Joanna Trollope, bestselling author whose village novels made her the ‘Queen of the Aga saga’

Having started in a small way with a handful of historical romances, some under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey (names borrowed from family forebears), her first attempt at contemporary fiction, The Choir (1987), was received with what she recalled as “a deafening silence” before being reissued in paperback and bounding up the bestseller lists. “A bit cheeky,” chided the Telegraph, “writing Trollopian novels about church politics when your name happens to be Trollope.”

Then came her tale of a middle-aged “perfect” wife embarking on a lesbian relationship with her children’s childminder in A Village Affair (1989), followed in swift succession by A Passionate Man (1990) and The Rector’s Wife (1991), in which an unhappy woman yearns to escape a soulless marriage, and which became her first No 1 bestseller, knocking Jeffrey Archer off his perch when it appeared in paperback in 1993.

That was the point at which Joanna Trollope’s career took off. At first she turned out readable, intelligent middlebrow novels, invariably set in an English village where smug, church-going, tea-drinking communities were rocked by scandal, often involving a clergyman. Most of her stories were set in the Cotswolds, where Joanna Trollope herself was now living with her second husband, the television dramatist Ian Curteis.