Joanna Trollope ( ; 9 December 1943 – 11 December 2025) was an English writer. She also wrote under the pseudonym of Caroline Harvey. Her novel Parson Harding's Daughter won the 1980 Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.

Early life, family and education

Joanna Trollope was born on 9 December 1943 at her grandfather's Her father was head of a small building society and an Oxford University classics graduate. Her mother was an artist and writer. Her father was away for Second World War service in India when she was born; he returned when she was three years old. The family settled in Reigate, Surrey. Trollope had a younger brother and sister. She was educated at Reigate County School for Girls, gaining a scholarship to St Hugh's College, Oxford, in 1961. She read English.

Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope was her fifth-generation uncle, and she was a cousin of the writer and broadcaster James Trollope. Of inheriting the name, she remarked:

Career

From 1965 to 1967, she worked at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. While a civil servant, From 1967 to 1979, she was employed in a number of teaching posts before she became a writer full-time in 1980.

Trollope began writing historical romances under the pseudonym of Caroline Harvey, the first names of her father's parents. She formed the view that: "It was the wrong genre for the time." The Choir, published in 1987, was her first contemporary novel. admitted a decade later that he "felt terribly guilty" for lumbering Trollope with the phrase. Trollope told Bedell in 1993 that her fiction does "the things the traditional novel has always done" by mirroring reality and exploring "people's emotional lives". Bedell observed that her novels until then were:

<blockquote>never suburban, which is the real condition of most of England. Trollopian action takes place in large village houses, at vast kitchen tables; her doctors, vicars, solicitors and craft-gallery owners may worry about money, as her own parents did, but they don't have any social anxieties: they are invited for drinks at the big house as a matter of course. The books are as economically prestigious, and quite as aspirational in their own way, as the glitter blockbusters of the Eighties. She wrote the first novel in HarperCollins updating of the Jane Austen canon, The Austen Project. Her version of Sense and Sensibility was published in October 2013 with limited success.

An adaptation of The Rector's Wife (<!-- The year of first screening in the UK as well. -->1994), produced for Channel 4, starred Lindsay Duncan and Ronald Pickup. The Choir, adapted by Ian Curteis, was a five-episode BBC television miniseries in 1995. It starred Jane Asher and James Fox. Of her other novels, A Village Affair and Other People's Children were also adapted for television.

Marrying the Mistress: ″With its sharp eye, light tone and sly, witty pace, Joanna Trollope's ninth novel delivers all the ingredients of romantic comedy, yet ends with a subtle, dark twist.″

Friday Nights: Heather Thompson of The Guardian called Friday Nights "a light but insightful look at a rather conventional cast of characters."

Charlie Lee-Potter, in an article for The Independent, wrote that Brother & Sister:

Personal life and death

On 14 May 1966,

Trollope appeared on a 1994 edition of the radio programme Desert Island Discs. She remarked that men often suggested her books were trivial, to which she liked to respond: "It is a grave mistake to think there is more significance in great things than in little things", paraphrasing Virginia Woolf.

At age 82, Trollope died at her home in Oxfordshire on 11 December 2025.

Works

As Joanna Trollope

Source:

: Some of Joanna Trollope's historical novels are re-edited as Caroline Harvey**

Historical novels

  • Eliza Stanhope (1978)
  • Parson Harding's Daughter (1979)**
  • The City of Gems (1981)**
  • The Steps of the Sun (1983)**
  • The Taverner's Place (1986)**

The Austen Project

  • Sense & Sensibility (2013)
  • A Passionate Man (1990)
  • The Rector's Wife (1991)
  • Next of Kin (1996)
  • The Best of Friends (1998)
  • Other People's Children (1998)
  • Marrying the Mistress (2000)
  • Girl from the South (2002)
  • Brother and Sister (2004)
  • Second Honeymoon (2006)
  • Friday Nights (2007)
  • The Other Family (2010)
  • Daughters-in-Law (2011)
  • The Soldier's Wife (2012)
  • Balancing Act (2014)
  • City of Friends (2017)
  • An Unsuitable Match (2018)
  • Mum & Dad (2020)

Non-fiction

  • Britannia's Daughters: Women of the British Empire (1983)

As Caroline Harvey

Source:

Legacy Saga

  • Legacy of Love (1983)
  • A Second Legacy (1993)

Historical novels

  • A Castle in Italy (1993)
  • The Brass Dolphin (1997)

See also

  • Aga saga

References

  • Joanna Trollope biography from the British Council

Interviews

  • Joanna Trollope discusses The Rector's Wife on the BBC World Book Club
  • Interview with Jami Edwards, April 1999, BookReporter.com