RICHARD KAY: Joanna Trollope was the Queen of the Aga Saga whose tales of rural infidelity mirrored her personal turbulent love life

Her vivid stories of romance, intrigue and middle-class infidelity made her a fortune and a household name. But Joanna Trollope, who has died aged 82, admitted that far from being an expert on affairs of the heart, she was never any good at matrimony.

Much like her heroines she had an often turbulent emotional life. With two broken marriages behind her, she settled for life as a singleton, which she later reckoned had given her the best years of all. Where once she admitted to having a ‘primitive need to be attractive to men’, she was content spending time with her grandchildren or bingeing on a boxset.

Her books, however, for which she was dubbed the ‘Queen of the Aga Saga’ – a label she loathed – told a different tale.

Their portrayal of life and sex in the English shires was wildly popular. In a writing career spanning 45 years, she published more than 40 novels which sold more than five million copies, every one eagerly anticipated by her loyal army of mainly women readers.

Some of her most famous titles, with names like The Rector’s Wife, The Choir and Other People’s Children are instantly recognisable after hugely successful TV adaptations.

Her death on Thursday came just 24 hours after Sophie Kinsella, author of the Shopaholic novels, died of a brain tumour and only weeks after she lost her close friend Jilly Cooper – like Trollope a colossus of popular women’s fiction – who died after suffering a fall at home.

Unlike Cooper, to whom she was inevitably compared and who loved poking fun at herself and at her success, Joanna Trollope was somewhat measured. But she was not entirely the primly buttoned-up figure who was often photographed in cosy Cotswold domesticity with a labrador at her feet and a fire burning brightly in the grate.

Not long after marriage number two broke up – to TV dramatist Ian Curteis – she posed for a remarkable photoshoot reclining on a chaise longue while clad in a black leotard and fishnet stockings which showed off her long, shapely legs. Added to this vignette was a feather boa and a come hither look far removed from that ‘Aga Saga’ tag that she found patronising. Coined by a man, she liked to remind critics.

Was this the real Joanna Trollope, a femme fatale with that still bubbling ‘primitive need’, or was it merely another one of those unexpected twists she liked to insert into her fiction – like the happily married wife discovering she is a lesbian in The Village Affair?

Her speciality was writing about the emotional minutiae of life in small communities, where no matter how huge and rampant the passion, it was hemmed in by humdrum, everyday stuff.

The photoshoot was to promote her then new book, Marrying The Mistress. It was written in the wake of the disintegration of her 14-year union to Curteis.

She went through what she called a ‘mini breakdown’, a form of hell where she felt that familiar people and places no longer looked familiar, and that she was an alien in her own society.

But while it left her at times ‘absolutely sodden’ with her own tears, she acknowledged that 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. Friends thought she and Curteis had the perfect marriage – Jilly Cooper described them as ‘absolutely devoted’. The reality was somewhat different, and one day she put the dogs in her car and left.

‘I just needed to get the hell out,’ she later recalled. They divorced in 2001. He married another woman that same year.

For her part, Trollope preached the practical merits of domestic drudgery to overcome the misfortunes of relationships. ‘When you’ve had your heart broken, almost the best thing you can do is clean the bathroom – because tap polishing is one of the things you can control,’ she observed. 

Asked if her own career success was part of the reason why her relationships had broken down, she answered carefully. ‘The men I was married to had grown up in a generation when their expectations socially were quite different from the way they are now.’

After her second divorce she was often seen on the arm of a handsome French musician, 23 years her junior. But while she was coy when quizzed about their closeness, the relationship was platonic.

In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2020 she admitted she was happily single. ‘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. 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 were gay and, as a committed grandmother of nine, she was very content with her lot.

Joanna Trollope was born in 1943 in her grandfather’s rectory in the Gloucestershire village of Minchinhampton. Her father, Arthur, a descendant of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, ran the City of London Building Society, and her mother Rosemary was a portrait painter and author.

‘Oddly my name has been no professional help at all,’ Trollope once noted. ‘It seems to have made no difference … I admire him [Anthony Trollope] hugely, both for his benevolence and his enormous psychological perception.’

The eldest of three, she was educated at Reigate County School for Girls where she longed to look like Jane Fonda, but instead, by her own estimation, was gangly with ‘specs, frizzy hair and braces’. She won a scholarship to study English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where her tutors included Lord Of The Rings author JRR Tolkien.

Moving to London, she worked as a researcher at the Foreign Office, then, after her marriage in 1966 to the banker David Potter – they met at university – began teaching English in a prep school and at night-school. The couple had two daughters, Louise and Antonia.

Not long ago 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 later became stepmother to Curteis’s two sons.)

With Potter often travelling, she began to write – ‘to fill the long spaces after the children had gone to bed’.

She started with historical fiction before publishing her first novel, Eliza Stanhope, in 1978. In 1980 after her second, Parson Harding’s Daughter (1979) – published, like the following five, under the name Caroline Harvey – she stopped teaching to write full time.

When the marriage to Potter ended she moved back to the Cotswolds where she met Curteis who encouraged her to try contemporary fiction. Her first attempt, The Choir (1988), exploring the dramatic impact of the disbanding of the church choir in a small village, was well received. But it was her fourth, The Rector’s Wife (1991), the tale of a well-meaning woman frustrated by her limited options, that knocked Jeffrey Archer from the top of the bestseller list. There were three more top-ten bestsellers that year.

At the heart of all her books was a moral conundrum, often involving adultery or scandal, like the relationship between a widow and her stepson in A Passionate Man.

Her books, she said, were ‘actually quite subversive’ and dealt with ‘uncomfortable subjects’ but were often ‘dismissed as roses-round-the-door pot-boilers’.

Of her own good fortune, she once observed tartly that she was ‘living proof that it only takes 20 years to be an overnight success’.