Joanne Trollope was the quintessential chronicler of the shires | Books | Entertainment

It has been a deeply sad end to the year for some of our most iconic and important female novelists and the millions of fans of their inimitable writing.

Dame Jilly Cooper passed away aged 88 in October after a fall at home. Sophie Kinsella, author of the bestselling Shopaholic series, died earlier this week aged just 55 after battling a brain tumour for five years. And now Joanna Trollope, who wrote unerringly about the English shires and sold more than five million books, has died at the age of 82.

Despite being a quintessentially English writer, Trollope never liked being known as the ‘Queen of the Aga Saga’, an affectionate label given early in her career by a particularly perceptive critic – branding it “patronising and dismissive” in 2020. But no one ever came up with a better one.

For her books, beginning in 1988 with her first contemporary novel, The Choir, which followed a series of historical romances written under a pen name, focussed on the romances, dramas and intrigues of small communities, the trials of the middle-classes and their occasional affairs.

In doing so, Trollope became our leading chronicler of Middle England at its (largely) respectable best. It was a rich, entertaining vein and readers flocked to the former civil servant’s books. By her fourth novel, The Rector’s Wife, published in 1991, she was knocking Jeffrey Archer from the top of the hardback bestseller lists. And a year later, only Jilly Cooper and Archer himself were selling more paperbacks.

And no wonder. Her books were a warm, comforting bath where gentle themes played out mostly happily, even though later titles – she published more than 20 bestselling contemporary novels in all – tackled subjects like lesbianism and difficult relationships.

As she put it herself: “I write about what I feel is the preoccupation of this completely disregarded bulk of population who aren’t extremists of any type, they just want to live life.” Yet she was no pushover, despite the humane nature of her stories.

“I am of the generation who was brought up to believe that making the world happy was my duty as a woman,” she told the Express in 2020 after moving back to live in London full-time and publishing her 33rd and, as it turned out, final book, Mum & Dad. “Then I realised that was not the case. My husbands were both threatened by my success, particularly being of that generation.”

Indeed, she became increasingly convinced that the institution of marriage had had its day.

“I think marriage suits some people extremely well. It began as a very easy way to organise society, if everyone was in pairs with 2.2 children then they were easier to control, and before contraception it was for procreation. But marriages are too long now. In Tudor days, a ten-year marriage was a long marriage. A woman’s not going to be as she feels now when she’s 55, never mind 75.”

Having mastered marriages, ageing and relationships in her books, she came to came to mistrust voguish political correctness.

“I completely understand where political correctness came from because we wanted everybody to feel inclusive, no matter what your skin colour is, your sexuality. But of course it’s being exploited now. Of course people will try and push the boundaries. The pendulum has to swing far too far in the wrong direction before it comes back to being something reasonable.”

And she defied accusations of triviality from more snobbish critics, once responding: “It’s a grave mistake to think there is more significance in great things than in little things.”

Millions of grateful readers would no doubt wholeheartedly agree.