I first discovered Joanne Trollope 20 years ago via my mother, who handed me her copy of The Rector’s Wife with the wry comment, ‘Read this and be thankful you’re not an Anglican!’
(I didn’t fare too badly as a minister’s wife, particularly after the first ten years. There was one lady in our first parish who said, when I mentioned that my plan was to work full-time, ‘Oh. We prefer our ministers’ wives to stay at home and answer the phone.’ But reading The Rector’s Wife revealed to me how much worse things could have been.)
Having a favourite author is about as meaningless as having a favourite song, but if I did have one that came top for sheer uncomplicated enjoyment, it just might be Joanna Trollope.
Trollope is the master of domestic dramas, of describing the minutiae of family life. She is sometimes referred to, I suspect a little disparagingly, as the mistress of ‘Aga Sagas’. Agas are the big stoves that lots of middle-class families in the UK have. I may not have one, but my life, and the lives of most people I know well, is one long Aga Saga, and I take both enjoyment and consolation in reading about people like us.
Trollope’s writing is so accomplished you forget you’re reading. Other writers who have it all over her in sheer brilliance - Michelle de Krester, to use an extreme example - are wonderful but the writing is so stunningly beautiful that I am aware, always, that I am reading. At some level, it’s hard work. With Trollope’s stories, I am completely carried away – the story unspooling in my head like a movie.
In my own novel writing, Trollope is the writer I want to emulate. A few years ago, when I was struggling to make my first novel work I read The Rector’s Wife all over again and deconstructed it to see what made it such effortless reading. I am not good at analyzing literature in this way. I become lost in a story and I emerge, breathless, heart-broken or joyous, days later, in love with the story but unable to say how the author achieved this. My older daughter, however, is good at this kind of analysis. She read my manuscript and pointed out, for starters, that it was full of action and dialogue but there was virtually no description of scene.
As I worked laboriously through my beloved copy of The Rector’s Wife, inherited from Mum, underlining and scribbling in the margins in a way I hadn’t done since high school, I realized that one-third to one-half of the writing was descriptive. This was a revelation to me; this, then, was what made it almost cinematic, what caused the movie to roll in my head – every little gesture and detail was described. The scrunchie holding the pigtails of the toddler and the way she throws her playdough to the floor in disgust, the way her mother crosses her arms and leans against the kitchen bench as she faces her husband, spoiling for a fight, the tenderness with which he looks at the moles on his wife’s back as she turns away – there it all was, so familiar it was like looking at a different version of my own life.
Of course, literature is not just there to make us feel warm and cosy. Some of the most influential experiences of my life have come from discovering utterly other worlds and lives in the pages of a book, or from being confronted by my own contained, comfortable, sometimes smug existence by reading something excoriating, shocking, blistering.
But for sheer enjoyment, Trollope is the one for me. Having read all 17 of her novels, just last week I discovered to my joy that she has put out a new work. As it happens, it’s called The Soldier’s Wife. It is up to scratch, with its flawless examination of the agonies and joys of family life that are so dear and familiar to me. And, mum would be amused to hear, if she were still around, it caused me to be devoutly and profoundly thankful that I am not married into the army.