Best-selling author Joanna Trollope has died aged 82, her family has announced.
The writer was known as the “queen of the Aga saga” because her novels often focused on romance and intrigue in middle England, although she rejected the tag as “patronising”.
In a statement, her daughters Louise and Antonia said their “beloved and inspirational mother” had died “peacefully at her Oxfordshire home” on Thursday.
Trollope’s novels include The Rector’s Wife, Marrying The Mistress, Second Honeymoon and Daughters in Law.
Trollope’s literary agent James Gill said in a statement: 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.”
Trollope’s books have been translated into more than 25 languages, and several have been adapted for television.
Trollope was a writer for more than five decades, and one of the best known novelists in the UK.
She authored more than 20 contemporary novels including 2013’s Sense & Sensibility, the lead title in HarperCollins’s Austen Project.
The author also wrote 10 historical novels, which were published under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey.
Trollope occasionally wrote short stories and pieces for magazines, chaired book prizes, authored a 2006 study of women in the British Empire called Britannia’s Daughters, and edited a 1993 anthology of rural life called The Country Habit.
She received an OBE in 1996 for services to charity, and was made a CBE in 2019 for services to literature.
Trollope was born in Gloucestershire, a fifth-generation niece of the English novelist Anthony Trollope.
“I’m not a direct descendent of his, although I’m from the same family, but another branch of it,” she once told the Independent. “I admire him hugely, and take several things he said about writing very much to heart.”
She read English at Oxford University and worked in the Foreign Office and as a teacher before becoming a full-time author in 1980.
Her early novels were all written under her pseudonym until the release of her first contemporary novel, the choir, in 1987.
Several of her later novels were adapted for the screen, including A Village Affair, The Choir, Other People’s Children and The Rector’s Wife.
She told the Writers Write website that she preferred to use pen and paper to write her novels.
“I love the silence and intimacy and simplicity. I can also, when it’s going really well, write like the wind – 1,000 words an hour,” she said.
But the process of writing was “extremely hard”.
“But then, I think anything worthwhile is inevitably going to be hard,” she added.
“The most exciting moment for me is the penultimate chapter – the end is in sight, and clear, but the activity of the race isn’t quite yet over.”
The description of her books as “Aga sagas” caught on, despite only two of Trollope’s novels actually featuring an Aga.
She later admitted she was “fairly tired of such an inaccurate and patronising tag”, describing it as a “very unfortunate phrase” that had “done me a lot of damage”.
The “Aga saga” tag is thought to have come form novelist Terence Blacker, but Trollope said: “People who are rude about them don’t take into account the amount of research I do, which is swotty and immense.
“The name itself indicates a provincial cosiness, and is patronising of the readers. A lot of what I write into the books is bleak and challenging but I will be the Queen of the Aga saga to my dying day. It’s jolly annoying, but it is better than being the Queen of Hearts.”
Trollope’s work tackled a range of topics from affairs, blended families and adoption, to parenting and marital breakdown.
She also often wrote about remarriage, parenthood and the strains on the so-called “sandwich generation”, caring for both their children and their parents.
In The Soldier’s Wife, she portrayed families struggling to cope with the aftermath of a harrowing Afghanistan tour.
Fellow novelist Fay Weldon once said Trollope had “a gift for putting her finger on the problem of the times”.
Trollope said it was “a great honour and an even bigger challenge” to rework Austen’s Sense & Sensibility in 2013.
But she had previously said that comparisons of her own work with Austen’s “make me fidget”.
“There is a huge gulf between being great and being good. I know exactly which category I fall into and which she falls into,” she told the Independent.
“On a good day, I might be good. I think of my writing as contemporary accessible fiction and it really isn’t for me to add the qualifying adjectives.”
In a 1994 episode of Desert Island Discs, she again addressed criticisms that her books were trivial, responding: “It is a grave mistake to think there is more significance in great things than in little things.”
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