Bestselling author Joanna Trollope has died at the age of 82, her bereft family revealed today.
Ms Trollope, nicknamed the ‘Queen of the Aga Saga’ due to her much-loved books about mid-life romance and intrigue in middle England, passed away at home in the Cotswolds yesterday.
Her most famous books included The Rector’s Wife, Marrying the Mistress, Daughters in Law, The Choir, City of Friends, A Village Affair and The Other Family.
In a statement, her daughters Louise and Antonia said of the grandmother of nine: ‘Our beloved and inspirational mother Joanna Trollope has died peacefully at her Oxfordshire home, on December 11 aged 82.’
Her literary agent James Gill said: ‘It is with great sadness that we learn of the passing of Joanna Trollope, one of our most cherished, acclaimed and widely enjoyed novelists.
‘Joanna will be mourned by her children, grandchildren, family, her countless friends and – of course – her readers.’
A distant descendant of Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, Joanna sold more than 8million books worldwide after a career at the Foreign Office and as a teacher, writing in her spare time after her children went to bed.
Joanna became a full-time author in 1980, writing more than 40 books including 22 bestsellers, which were turned into six TV mini-series and films. Her most recent novel was Mum & Dad in 2020.
In 1996, Trollope was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to literature and later made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2019.
Her death on Thursday came just 24 hours after Sophie Kinsella, author of the Shopaholic novels and another titan of popular women’s fiction, died of a brain tumour aged 55.
Joanna’s close friend Jilly Cooper also died this year after a fall at home in October.
More than 8million people bought Ms Trollope’s books worldwide plus there were several TV and film adaptations of her novels.
Her writing was once dubbed Aga Sagas, a term which the author strongly disliked.
She said: ‘That was a very unfortunate phrase and I think it’s done me a lot of damage. It was so patronising to the readers too.’
But despite romance being a central theme of her novels, she recently admitted to having finally given up on men – claiming she didn’t need them.
She had been twice married but said she in 2020 she had been happily single for more than 20 years.
‘I’ve certainly taken myself off the market, yes,’ she said. ‘I think many women do. I’m not interested. I don’t need a man for anything’, she told the Daily Mail.
‘I’ve had two husbands but I haven’t been married for about 20 years — and they’ve been the best 20 years of my life’.
She said her closest male friends are gay and, as a committed grandmother of nine, she was very content with her lot.
Her daughters have five children between them and her two stepsons have four more.
She was devoted to her family.
Early in her own life, she joined the Foreign Office – but since women had to resign their posts upon marriage, Trollope was forced to begin her career again when she married David Potter in 1966 and, instead, became a teacher at Farnham Girls’ Grammar School, taking a big pay cut.
She began writing ‘to fill the long spaces after the children had gone to bed’ and for years combined it with working in schools. She became a full-time writer in 1980.
Her novels, which include The Choir, Marrying The Mistress, A Village Affair and The Other Family, plus the TV dramas adapted from her books, are rumoured to have earned her around £15 million as well as a CBE for services to literature.
One of the great chroniclers of the lives of mid-life women, Trollope published dozens of novels, most about love.
The Oxford-educated grand-daughter of a rector, Joanna had two long marriages.
She met her first husband, City banker David Potter, at Oxford and married in 1966 when he was 21 and she was 22.
They had two daughters, Louise, now 51, and Antonia, 48, and split up after 17 years in 1983.
In 2020, she revealed: ‘I’d have liked masses more children but I was married to someone totally unfaithful so I just wasn’t going to risk it.’
She met her second husband, TV dramatist Ian Curteis, in her late 30s. When they married in 1985, he brought two stepsons into her life.
They rented an enormous house in Gloucestershire — though with four children between them of university age, she says they couldn’t afford to put the heating on for the first three years.
And yet everything seemed rosy.
An interviewer who visited the couple back in 1993 observed: ‘They are, you sense, a couple who are scrupulously attentive to one another, who derive pleasure from easing each other’s lives.’
Their friend and fellow author Jilly Cooper described them as ‘absolutely devoted’.
At the time, Joanna was writing historical novels.
Her husband encouraged her to write about what she knew.
The Choir was Joanna’s first contemporary novel, followed by A Village Affair and A Passionate Man.
But it was her fourth novel, The Rector’s Wife, which knocked Jeffrey Archer off the bestseller spot in 1991 and stayed there for 50 weeks.
She had three top ten bestsellers that year — and, suddenly, they could very much afford the gas bill.
So it came as a great surprise to many when the marriage disintegrated after 13 years.
Joanna had what she described as a ‘mini-breakdown’, leaving her, at times, ‘absolutely sodden’ with her own tears.
But, she said, it was a relief to admit she wasn’t happy.
At the time, she was told she was imagining it all; that it was her fault. But she knew she couldn’t stay.
One day, she just put the dogs in the car and left Gloucestershire for London. ‘I just needed to get the hell out,’ she said.
She and Curteis divorced in 2001. He married another woman that same year.
‘The men I was married to had grown up in the generation when their expectations socially were quite different from the way they are now. They behaved very much like the Prime Minister and dug their heels in and pretended that everything was OK. They resented being undermined’, she said.
‘There were tensions in the relationships because of that. But stepping away from them made me realise that I didn’t have to carry the can for all of the mistakes.’
Early on, her books were dubbed ‘Aga sagas’ because of their middle-class Home Counties domestic settings.
Over a 30-plus year career, she tackled adoption, adultery, lesbianism, contested wills and post-traumatic stress.
Writer Fay Weldon once said that Trollope has ‘a gift for putting her finger on the problem of the times’.
‘She likes to tackle the apparently easy, but really very difficult subjects — how parents get on with their children, and vice-versa — which many a lesser writer prefers to avoid.’
A constant theme in her books is couples finding love in mid-life, much to the horror of their adult children.
‘Whatever the modern zeitgeist problem is that nobody is talking about, I’m trying to get the conversation going. We’re English and very reticent culturally’, she said.
The Oxford graduate recalled being told by a ‘dismissive’ careers adviser in 1964 that ‘you could nurse or teach or she said you could sit the Civil Service exam’.
She added: ‘I remember my friend Jill saying, “I think we’re going to have to get married”. That’s not a million miles away from Jane Austen. Just think how far you girls have come – but not far enough.’
