Author Joanna Trollope dies aged 82

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 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 22 contemporary novels including 2013’s Sense & Sensibility, the lead title in HarperCollins’s Austen Project, as well as 10 historical novels published under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey.

Trollope also 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, 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.

But 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”.

“Actually, the novels are quite subversive, quite bleak,” she told the Guardian.

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.”

Trollope’s work tackled a range of topics from affairs, blended families and adoption, to parenting and marital breakdown.