TIME EUROPE
APRIL 3, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 13
All in the Family
Keeping up a lucrative tradition, Joanna Trollope writes another bestseller about ordinary lives
By HELEN GIBSON London
The great victorian novelist Anthony Trollope did not deal in the Tolstoyan theme of the grand passions. His preoccupation, he once noted, was rather to chronicle the little troubles and traumas of people's daily lives. Trollope turned that preoccupation into serious literary and monetary success, and his descendant is following in his footsteps. Anthony Trollope's distant relation Joanna--they share an ancestor--who always defers to her kinsman as the "real" Trollope, also likes to lift the lid off middle-class lives in parochial England. Her intelligent, acutely perceptive observations of their emotional dilemmas are compulsively page-turning, and her books have sold more than 6 million copies around the world.
Marrying the Mistress, her 10th contemporary novel--she also writes historical fiction--recently hit Britain's bookstores and, boosted by a controversial storyline, moved straight to the top slots of the best-seller lists. It caused a stir because Trollope firmly sides with the novel's protagonist, a 62-year-old judge who wants to leave his wife and marry his young barrister mistress. Laura, the deserted wife of 40 years, who has apparently sacrificed career for family and devotes herself to her house and garden, is the villain of the piece.
Isn't Trollope a little hard on Laura, even if under all that passivity she is a manipulator who tries to force her married son to dance attendance on her in her husband's place? Not at all, says Trollope crisply. "There are wives who behave in a steadily denigrating fashion in a long marriage," she says. "And there are many women for whom it is much easier to love a house and garden than an aging man who is becoming rather troublesome as he approaches retirement, and is experiencing all kinds of anxieties and declining self-esteem." Trollope says she had also wanted to examine the received opinion that "wronged wives are always in the right, wronging husbands always in the wrong and mistresses unprincipled home wreckers ... I'm not saying any of those clichés are untrue. But I am saying, let's look at them."
A poised, pencil-slim 56-year-old with an Oxford degree and two marriages behind her, Trollope has always written somewhat subversive, even bleak, tales. Yet the literati, hung up on Scottish delinquency and Irish poverty, until recently rather patronizingly labeled them Aga Sagas--shorthand for middle-brow soaps about the well-heeled rural English with fashionable Aga cookers in their kitchens. "It was irritating, because the books have always been more realistic than that," says Trollope. Indeed, she writes nothing too emotionally neat and never a happy ending. Her families, where individuals are "as intermittently sympathetic and slap-worthy as people are in real life," often painfully navigate the fallout from the affairs of a wife with her female childminder, a husband with his new stepmother, or a farmer with his daughter's funky flatmate. As Trollope's books have become bleaker and her readership has rocketed, the Aga Saga tag has faded.
Trollope wrote Marrying the Mistress after a long, crippling depression during the breakup of her 13-year-long second marriage to a well-known TV playwright, Ian Curteis. She fell in love with Curteis after meeting him at her parents' house while she was still unhappily married to a merchant banker she had met while at Oxford. In a saga straight from one of her novels, Trollope married Curteis in 1985 and they lived with her two daughters and his two sons in a glorious old stone millhouse complete with Aga. It was Curteis' active encouragement that persuaded Trollope to switch from historical to contemporary fiction, and in 1992 her fourth book, The Rector's Wife, took off. Fame and fortune followed, and it seemed Trollope had finally found both love and self-fulfillment--another of her concerns. Yet also, Trollope-style, the idyllic picture hid less happy realities.
For a start, the millhouse was rented, and in the first years the Curteises were so financially stretched that they could not heat it. More crucial, as Trollope's career waxed, Curteis' waned, and the relationship inexorably deteriorated. "A man said to me the other night, '99% of men would be nothing but thrilled if their wives were as successful as you,' but I wonder," Trollope remarks. "I wonder if you can take the chunk labeled Hunter-Gatherer out of most men, any more than the chunk labeled Motherhood out of women, and whether it is absolutely natural that a man should feel diminished, degraded almost, at being less successful."
Although the collapse of her second marriage caused her a deep sense of failure, Trollope finds it liberating that success is now no longer an issue. "I can be wholeheartedly good at things without pretending I'm not," she says. As in her novels, there is no truly happy ending to this saga, but Trollope has at least two books gestating and she enjoys a heady new sense of freedom. The one thing that does worry her is whether she'll know when to stop writing, well before quantity obliterates quality. Judging by her rising sales, that's no problem yet.
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