Joanna Trollope Mark Lawson Talks To...

Sharing the surname of one of the great 19th century writers -

Anthony Trollope, author of the Barchester Chronicles -

Joanna Trollope has earned more and more of her own

space on the book shelf and in the video-library of TV adaptations.

After originally writing romantic fiction, she began,

in 1988, a series of bestselling contemporary novels dealing

with social or sexual dilemmas.

The first - The Choir - was

adapted for screen by Ian Curteis, who is now her second ex-husband.

After 17 modern novels - most recently, The Soldier's Wife -

Joanna Trollope recently combined the historical and the contemporary

with a 21st century rewrite of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.

There is a division between writers.

Some say they write for themselves, essentially.

They write the book that they would like to read or, indeed, like to

write. And there are others who have a reader in mind.

Marketing departments and publishers famously have a reader in mind.

Do you have, in your case - with an AGA in the kitchen and all the rest of it -

do you have a Joanna Trollope reader in mind?

No, I don't at all, but I do have a sense of an audience because

when I'm writing, I'm very conscious of a kind of movie happening

inside my head that I can both see and hear and I'm describing it.

But it's not for a specific cardboard cut-out of the ideal

reader. It's for other people. It definitely is for other people.

I'm of the camp... I don't feel this is a beloved baby that

I can't bear to give away.

I feel, at the end of a novel, I've lived

so intensely with these people for so long I'm quite thankful to

hand them over to other people to proceed with, really.

This is fascinating, as you say, because many writers do talk about

their books as their babies,

but you're very happy to leave them on somebody else's doorstep?

Oh, very much so, yes. Oh, yes, under the cabbage leaf, without question!

I think it's surprised some people -

I don't know if it's surprised your publishers -

but it's interesting, a lot of your most admiring reviews

have been from male critics and you clearly have male readers.

Was that unexpected to you or to your publishers?

I don't think it was unexpected to me because, after all, men have

all the emotional and inner lives that woman do. It's just

the culture has forbidden them to articulate it as much. But it's

quite interesting how the culture does prevent them admitting it.

I mean, an awful lot of the fan mail I get - obviously, by e-mail now,

not letter letters - but they start by saying, you know,

"I just happened to pick up my girlfriend's copy

"of something!"

You know, you can't be seen to be carrying it like you could be

seen to be carrying a Jay McInerney or a Wilbur Smith or something.

It's not quite blokey enough.

The tendency in publishing to categorise... I had an interesting

example the other day - I was talking to a writer who had just

received the suggested jacket for her new book, and she ripped it up

and said, "I do not write chick lit

"and these people are trying to position me

"as a writer of chick lit!"

These categories they have - chick lit, AGA Saga, all the rest of it -

has that been infuriating to you?

It's slightly infuriating, but actually, the readers don't

take much notice of it. And it's increasingly dictated

by the retail end.

And, you know, we never thought we'd say, "Thank God for supermarkets!"

when it came to shifting physical books, but now the supermarkets

want things of a certain size and a certain appearance and

they're quite dictatorial, in their way, about what they'll accept.

And a lot of people, I think, don't even know this goes on

or are astonished by it, but the stories, certainly, I hear, with

the supermarkets, they will change the jacket of a book, ask for

that change, they may even ask for the title to be changed. There are,

it is said, cases of them asking for the author's name

to be changed, even.

Really? I hadn't heard of that.

Well, asking someone to go to initials or whatever

so that they don't appear so male or female.

That's, again, trying to imitate a certain mega...

-JK Rowling.

-Yes, or even EL James.

Yes. It's a sort of tremendous anxiety.

It's a sort of herd instinct.

And, of course, you... It goes on until somebody else breaks the mould.

And the physical book is rearing its head again as a very

desirable possession

because, after all, you don't own an e-book, do you? You only lease it.

So if you have a library of e-books, you can't leave them,

say, to your grandchildren.

But some people, as you know, are quite apocalyptic about this.

You've probably been to these sales conferences where people

say, "In ten years, it will all be e-books. There won't be any

"physical books at all for most publications."

I mean, it's clear, from what you say, you would regret that.

I would regret it and I don't think it'll happen.

And if it did happen, then the book will start

again in a sort of green shoots way. Some enterprising little

publisher will produce an exquisite thing and people will say,

"Isn't this an extraordinarily simple and effective piece of technology?

"Why didn't we think of this before?" And the book'll be born again.

You've just written a modern

version of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.

It overlaps with the bulk of your work in the modern

novels in that it forces you, it forces us, to ask that question -

how much has changed for women in terms of

the expectations of marriage, the possibilities of a career.

I mean, that's the big question, isn't it?

Oh, it is, and Jane Austen's three great themes - money,

class and romantic love are still the burden of an enormous

number of lives nowadays

and continue to be throughout the length of those lives.

Really very, very little has changed. What has changed -

and Jane would have applauded this herself - is that women now

have money. You don't need to marry money or inherit money.

You are not the possession of another human being.

Jane Austen - which is one of the few things

she has in common with Justin Bieber - has a fanatical fan base

-who protect her image.

-And possessive.

Yes, possessive. The Janeites, the Jane Austen Society,

were you a bit frightened of them when you took on this?

No, not in the least. My advice to them has been

if this upsets you, kindly do not read it. You know, why put

yourself through the misery of reading an updated version?

Because I've stuck like paint to the story and to the characters,

and also... And this was really liberating to Jane's

attitude to the characters because there's only two

characters in the whole novel that she doesn't tease, which is

Marianne and the poor, ardent, silent, noble Colonel Brandon.

They're the only two.

Everybody else she makes fun of, and it was actually very freeing

to make fun of them, too. I really enjoyed it!

"Wills slid his arm down Marianne's back

"and said in a stage whisper, "Jump in!" "What?"

"Jump in! Get in the car! Ghastly outing off, wonderful reprieve

"and alternative on."

"Marianne stood slowly upright.

"She was smiling delightedly at him. "What alternative?"

"He came swiftly round the car and opened the passenger door.

"Hop in, like I said. Quickly!"

"She still paused in front of him.

"He was looking down at her with a mixture of intensity

"and merriment that made her feel she could never refuse him anything.

"Wills? What..." He leaned forward and brushed his mouth across hers

"and then he said, his face only an inch away,

"We're going to Allenham and we are going alone!"

The dream and aim of feminism, which was equality -

personally, professionally - has that been achieved now for women?

It was equality of opportunity, wasn't it, really?

No, it hasn't. No, it really hasn't.

There are little pockets of it happening

but it's one of those things that's going to take, I think,

absolute generations while everybody sorts themselves out.

I'm... I'm...

..very opposed to the idea of feminism being anti-men.

I think it won't work unless it's inclusive.

And I don't like, you know, the ads on television that show men as

fumblingly incompetent and unable even to organise their own motor

insurance and the idea of a "man cold",

as if men made far more fuss about everything than...

You know, there's an unattractive... I suppose

it's a boosting of self-confidence by diminution of something else.

It's a version of schadenfreude, isn't it, really? Such a useful word!

-Which has no translation in English.

-Which has no translation.

It is interesting, though, isn't it, that particularly in comedy,

sitcoms, adverts, as you say, the men are always useless?

Yes, yes. And it so is not the case and needn't be.

Certainly, from my observation,

and some horror stories I've heard from modern women,

men haven't evolved perhaps as far as we would have liked.

A lot of men still have a lot of trouble, certainly with

the idea of the woman being more successful

and richer than they are if they're in a relationship.

I do hope it's generational. I mean, it certainly applies

to my generation and, I think, to the one below it. But looking at,

for example, my sons'-in-law generation, they are much

more used to the idea of a working partner, and their attitude to child

rearing is a lot more partner-like. You know, a child who's fallen and

hurt itself will run to its father as much as its mother nowadays

in a way that, you know, for my generation, wasn't

even conceived of. In fact, you know, men - it's unbelievable -

but men used to boast about having never changed a nappy

and not have been at all ashamed of it, either!

Although it seems to be that the big question is,

it's touched on in a number of your books,

is you can change ideology, but you can't change biology,

at least at the moment, who knows what is ahead in the future?

Being pregnant and fathering a child

are hugely different things, aren't they?

Hugely different, hugely different, and one of the elements that is,

to me, so absolutely fascinating and fuels all the novels

is that the carapace of civilisation

we have on top of all of our very primitive instincts

is alarmingly thin, it's just a veneer.

And you scratch it. You crack the veneer with some trauma -

divorce, betrayal, redundancy, death, whatever it is -

and all the beasts are released,

all the snakes rise out of Pandora's box.

It's really as if we are...

Civilisation is just keeping a lid - barely - on some

very, very visceral feelings.

And because, in that context,

because of the subjects you deal with very often - infidelity, divorce,

stepchildren, bereavement, adoption, do you see or intend the books

as having any kind of therapeutic affect for people reading them?

I don't think I intend that,

although I have to admit I am hugely gratified

when they do have that affect.

I remember a very famous person, who is a woman,

and who is gay, who said she took several copies of A Village Affair

home to her family in order to say to them,

"Actually, this is me,"

because she couldn't quite think

how she was going to get the conversation going without,

so if they're an icebreaker then I'm absolutely thrilled.

but I don't set out with any didactic or pedagogic purpose,

because I don't know any better than anybody.

I mean, all I'm doing is recording what I see -

it's laying out as much psychological and sexual landscape

as I possibly can and then the reader decides what they'll make

of it, what they identify with, what they really disapprove of.

I just want them to think the people are real, that's all.

A Village Affair was a book that attracted a huge deal of attention,

because people saw it as racy, as shocking,

they had the idea of a married woman falling in love with a woman.

Did you see it as a racy or provocative book?

No, I just saw it as a truthful book.

I mean I'd come across this situation of a young woman,

married with children, who plainly was gay,

but in that society could do nothing about it

except rather clandestine things that made everyone unhappier

than they would have been if she'd been able to be open.

If it had been now, it would have been so different,

but we were at the very...

It was, you know, before homosexuality was even legal,

so, you know, we've come a very long way, not before time.

But I just remember thinking that this was a very unjust,

wrong and, I have to be honest, fascinating situation,

and I wanted to write about it.

And an uncomprehending man who simply didn't get

what was happening.

Although I think it is... It has always been one of the purposes

of fiction, I think it's why the novel is such a successful form,

that in a lot of fiction we get to explore other people's lives,

we get to think about other lives or decisions

we might have made. I mean, it's unimaginable, isn't it,

that if you have... For example, you have an unhappy wife reading

a novel about an unhappy wife, there is bound to be a connection

about "Should I do what she did? Should I not do what she did?"

It's almost more a feeling of not being alone.

I think we learn more from good fiction about life

and la condition humaine than we do from any other source

except living life ourselves.

I think fiction is incredibly helpful in all sorts of ways.

You're seeking not to be alone,

particularly in a case of rather primitive reaction

to some appalling thing that's happened.

And you know that phrase of curling up with a book?

Well, if you think of a physical book,

it's almost like a little confessional, isn't it?

it's just you and the pages

and you can somehow confide in that book your own frailties,

your own longings, your own fears or disappointments, whatever it is.

That book is a safe place to put your in most self

that you might really be very happy not to share

with another living person.

The novelist Fay Weldon tells a story of,

I think this was in the '60s or '70s, getting a letter from someone

saying, "I left my husband after reading your novel."

Have you had that kind of letter?

Yes, yes, I have, and I've had people at signings, you know,

bursting into tears, thrusting a book at me saying...

I remember a woman in Manchester once

with a copy of Other People's Children which is about stepfamilies

and she said, "His children are driving me mad! What should I do?"

And, you know, there was a queue, you know, 40 people waiting.

There was nothing to be said, except...

If you feel that instinctively, I can't give you permission,

but you know it's obviously a serious situation

and to be taken seriously, and I think...

I'm not at all surprised about that, not at all surprised.

Does it alarm you to be given that...?

I mean, it's the kind of responsibility that people are either

taking advice from your novels or asking you for advice.

I don't think it is alarming, because it's not a dictation,

it's merely a suggestion or a guidance.

I see it far more as my voice in the novel saying, "You're not alone.

"You're allowed to be furious and angry and jealous

"and behave badly and burst into tears in front of your children."

You know, that is human, we have all done it.

It's only that really, it's a reassurance more than anything.

It's not saying, "Well, go."

THEY CHUCKLE

We know relatively little about your childhood,

but we know you were born in a rectory in Gloucestershire,

which sounds tremendously gentile, so was it?

Well, it was 100 years ago, Mark, that's why.

It was another world.

I mean, it was, you know, it was before television,

it was in the war, my father had begotten me

and then he went off to India and he...

I didn't see him until I was nearly four.

It's very common for people of my generation.

And so my mother went home to her parents' house.

My grandfather was a...

Well, it sounds like a dinosaur now.

He was a hunting parson - it's absolutely extraordinary, isn't it?

It's like something out of sort of Oliver Goldsmith or something.

And so I was born there in the rectory you know with dogs

on the bed. It was all...

And, you know, a doctor in a three-piece tweed suit

with a gold watch chain,

who probably arrived on horseback himself. I mean, it was all...

It seems like something from a completely other era.

So that's why it began that way and that's where I stayed

till I was three and a bit.

And you're very good at psychology, as we know from the books,

I'm fascinated by the psychological consequences

of this kind of upbringing because Melvyn Bragg, you may know,

he wrote a novel The Soldier's Return because he had a similar experience,

and it's about the experience of meeting your father

and your father being a stranger,

because he's been away at war. Is that what you had?

I don't really remember it.

There are various little nuggets of memory I have,

but I don't remember my father coming back

and it must have been that whole generation,

it must have been unbearable.

And they hadn't had family life for four or five years,

and they'd been, you know, in my father's case, he was in northern India.

I mean, what can it have been like for them?

And then to come back to this deeply deprived, shattered,

cold, miserable, hungry, depressed, dark country

to relationships

which had inevitably changed and, in my father's case, you know,

to a child.

So that that comes in tangentially to The Soldier's Wife, doesn't it?

-It does.

-Yeah, your most recent novel,

apart from the Jane Austen one,

which is about that - is what it's like for someone to come back

-from that kind of experience.

-Very much so.

That that novel was fascinating to research,

because I sort of embedded myself with a regiment on Salisbury Plain

in order to talk to the officers, to the men,

to their girlfriends, their wives, their children, their parents.

I went on exercise with them, up at Otterburn in Northumberland,

never seen men so happy or so dirty in all my life.

They were all gunners and they were extraordinarily open about it.

But the adjustment is phenomenal

and of course they form these passionate and powerful bonds

with each other as you do when your life depends upon the men

either side of you. It's got nothing...

It's not in the least homoerotic, or it might have an edge of that,

but it's mostly really about survival and life,

and you have a purpose,

because that's what's so awful for people now -

is to be without a purpose.

You know, the latest novel,

the one that will be under my own name that will be out in the spring,

is set very largely in Stoke-on-Trent in the potteries.

Now, about 50 years ago, everybody in the six towns

round Stoke-on-Trent knew exactly why they lived there -

they worked down the pits or in the pots.

And now there are these huge, benighted council estates all round

the six towns and nobody knows why they live there any more.

And, of course, for soldiering, it is the ultimate purpose.

You know, for a man of a certain temperament.

In the case of your childhood, with your father having been away,

did that make you a Mummy's girl?

Were you closer to your mother?

I suppose I probably was, because it was another five years till

my father came back and my brother was born

and then my sister after him.

So I expect we were extremely close,

and did a lot of things together... As one did then.

But I think it's...it's an odd thing looking back

and I think if you are the eldest, you almost...

And if you are an eldest girl,

you often become a kind of extra mother to the ones who come later.

I have a much clearer recollection of looking after my brother

and sister when they arrived

than I do of what it was like before they got here,

I can remember that bit much more clearly.

And were you, we might assume you were a bookish child, but were you?

Well, I think everybody was before the age of television.

I think we all learnt to read very young.

I think we were expected to,

but you were also expected not to read all the time, you know?

It wasn't really suitable to read before lunch for some reason.

You know, reading a novel before lunch

was somehow morally very dubious. Isn't it interesting?

-That is.

-Yeah.

-Was it? It was thought, not that it was bad for your eyes or anything to read too much...

No, it was just sort of wrong.

You should be... I don't know, turning the mangle or something.

And, as you say, your grandfather was a hunting parson.

Was it a churchy...a churchy family, in general?

Well, it was old-fashioned churchy.

He was rather a glamorous figure. He delivered parish magazines

on horseback and, in the cubbing season,

I remember seeing him going off across the village square

to take early Communion, and you could see he'd got his spurs

and his hunting boots on under his cassock.

But it did, sort of... I think it bred something in me,

it bred the cradle, if you like,

the very beginnings of The Rector's Wife,

because he was obviously...

This was... He was a good-looking man anyway,

but the parish groupies were, I mean, thick and fast.

I don't remember a single uninterrupted meal without somebody

in a, sort of, Anita Brookner cardigan appearing at the front door

saying she would, "just like a quiet word with the rector."

Did I hear you right?

Are you offering yourselves as deputy rector's wives?

Yes.

Have you spoken to Peter about this?

No, of course not.

What exactly do you propose?

Well, perhaps some of the organisational things,

the nuts and bolts of the entertaining,

and that would leave you free,

as is only proper, for the public roles -

being in charge, visitors, attending functions, that sort of thing.

We have a little team in mind, seven ladies.

My grandmother was a formidable and fascinating woman.

Extremely clever.

But she was, of course, a rector's wife

in the days when you had to take on your husband's vocation.

And luckily for me, as a future novelist,

she made no secret of her frustration.

And I think I must have bottled all of that up for later use.

Well, you know partly Scots, never waste anything.

"I can't be myself.

"I can't be an individual, only someone relative to Peter,

"to the parish, to the church.

"I'm 42 and I don't expect I ever will be myself now.

"The parish has become the other woman in my life, our lives.

"I don't blame Peter for that.

"He has to believe in its importance

"in order not to feel he's wasted everything.

"I expect that for other clergy wives

"whose husbands are less disappointed than Peter,

"God is the other woman.

"Do you understand me? Are you listening?"

Having come back from the war, what did your father do professionally?

He first ran a rather eccentric little building society in London

called the City of London Building Society.

And he made money out of it, did he?

Not really. Not really.

I don't think he was that interested in it.

He had a kind of...a rather frugal

and austere attitude to money. Quite careful.

And so I don't think money was ever...

Our childhood was sort of rich in creativity,

but not in anything at all glamorous.

It wasn't austere, but it was just a very sort of moderate,

middle-class household.

My sister and I were state educated.

There was money for private school fees for one,

so it obviously had to be my brother, according to the mores of the day,

and that's sort of how it happened.

Your website records, with a tantalising lack of detail,

you were very unhappy at school, so, um...

I wasn't very unhappy, I just kind of got through it.

No, I don't think... It wouldn't be fair to say I was very unhappy.

But I don't think as a person I'd sort of come into my own at all.

I was an anxious child and I think I was anxious at school.

I was this height when I was 12, quite tall,

and, you know, frizzy hair and specs

and braces on my teeth and no good at games,

with a propensity to swottiness and getting my homework in on time.

So I think I wasn't a very attractive proposition.

I'm not surprised I wasn't very popular.

And I sounded like this, in a school where nobody else did much.

And I remember asking for somebody to pass something at school lunch,

you know, the pickled beetroot or something,

and I remember her turning to me and saying, "Eurgh, la-di-da!"

And I can hear her now.

Do you remember a newsreader called Peter Woods?

-Yes.

-His sister, Dorothy,

-taught me A-level English.

-Right.

And that was the first person who said to me,

"You needn't be particularly invisible or average.

"I think you really could think, if you put your mind to it.

"And I'm going to hand you Wordsworth

"and you're going to immerse yourself in that."

And it was the prelude, really,

that got me an S-level and I think got me into university.

We know from your website you wrote your first novel at the age of 14.

-I did.

-What was the opening line of it?

I have no idea.

I can visualise it.

It's in red spiral-back notebooks

and it's been under lock and key for these 50 years,

and that's where it'll stay.

-Now, um...do you plan to have it burned?

-No, I don't.

I think the girls can have a field day with it when I'm safely dead.

I think, actually, they really might enjoy it.

Because looking back, you see, I think...

I think it's about the kind of teenager I wished I was.

You know, I wanted to look like Jane Fonda

with a blonde ponytail and sticky-out gingham skirts

and, you know, all the sports jocks sort of huddled around me

instead of everybody sniggering and hurrying on past.

So I think it's a complete fantasy.

Scholarship to Oxford University at the start of the '60s, a lot...

I have to say, it was this big, the scholarship.

It was almost invisible to the naked eye.

It was worth £40 a year.

But I could wear a long gown.

But we can't make it sound as if it was anything very glamorous.

Now, this is really interesting.

Your website records that you joined the Foreign Office.

-Were you in fact a spy?

-No, I wasn't a spy.

I was in a funny little research department.

They've just pulled down the building in which I worked,

which was on the north end of Vauxhall Bridge.

And we had to sit the Civil Service exams.

I went to see the careers office in Oxford,

with my best friend Jill, now sadly dead.

She died of cancer when she was only 50.

And we went to see the career's woman together,

who was so bored to see us, I can't tell you.

And she said to us, "Well, you know, there's three options.

"You can teach, or you can nurse, or you can join the Civil Service."

I remember us standing outside in St Giles, leaning on our bicycles,

and I remember Jill saying to me,

"Do you think that means we'll have to get married?"

Which, of course, we did, almost immediately.

You know, people married terribly young then.

But you were 23 when you married for the first time.

No, I was 22. I was just 22. Yeah.

Which clearly, in retrospect, was too young.

Far too young. Far too young.

But I was working by then

in this little thing called the Information Research Department.

And you did have to sign the Official Secrets Act.

And I remember it was extraordinary,

George Brown was the Foreign Secretary

and he used to come round to see us all after lunch,

which was never a good idea.

We should explain for younger viewers,

he was a bit of a drinker and a bit of a lech, wasn't he?

Terrifying. I remember the girl I shared a room with

in our first office before the new building,

we were moved into it, was in Carlton House Terrace.

And we were in... Me and my friend Leslie,

we were in a room together with an enormous key

that we had to lock when we left to go to the loo.

And it had a brass tag hanging off the key which said,

"Mr Aster's Bathroom."

So I wasn't much of a spy even then.

And if we knew it was a George Brown visiting day,

we both used to stand with our backs against very tall filing cabinets.

Did he have a go?

He had a go at everybody, yes.

But he was... There was something quite endearing about him.

He was a clever man.

And actually, if he wasn't complete legless,

he was quite entertaining. He was funny.

And very, very well educated.

You know, and kind of... There was a civilised thing.

What the drink was about, I don't know. Some sort of escape.

He was very, very plain. I wonder if it was that.

For quite a long time, you combined being a mother

and working as a teacher with wanting to be a writer.

When had that taken hold, the desire to be an author?

Oh, I'd always wanted to.

Not so much for the business of being a published writer,

it was this absolute fascination with story.

Because I think story is how we live our lives.

You know, story is how we make friendships.

Because it's the exchange of anecdote.

How you make decisions, because you base your decision

on the happenings of the past,

which are all narrative of one kind or another.

So there was this urge not so much, um...to be a published writer,

but to have this...

this extraordinary communication with other people.

To feel that you'd sort of held a hand out and had it taken.

And that it was a two-way traffic.

I mean, for me, there'd be no point in writing

if there weren't readers to read.

I'm very conscious of that human energy out there

that this is a two-way traffic.

That I'm luring them into a book, in a way.

I'm enticing them in. I'm including them in it.

It's as if we are getting onto a train

at some point in the characters' lives

and they are in the middle of some sort of terrible dilemma,

or they get themselves into it just as we board the train,

and then we do part of the journey and then we all get off

and the characters go on again.

And then I like to leave the readers with something to do.

Some sort of narrative ends to tie up in the end.

So I see it very much

as a collaborative, almost symbiotic process.

They're as necessary to me as the story

and the characters that I'm writing about.

And as you suggest there, the reason we're so obsessed with story

and fiction is so popular in all its forms,

-is that we're in a story and we don't know the outcome of it.

-No.

A relationship is a story. A relationship with a child is a story.

Your children's lives are a story. We're just surrounded by them.

Yes, we are. They are absolutely everywhere.

And they all have validity.

And then they sort of bump up against each other

and that's when all the tensions and misunderstandings occur.

And that is, of course, as far as I'm concerned, the stuff of fiction.

But there is a feeling among some of your readers, I think,

some critics, that the contemporary novels were what you were born to do.

-That that was when you really found your voice.

-Yes.

-You do think that?

-Yes, I do think that.

-Why, though, why historical fiction originally?

Oh, I should think nervousness and...

a kind of feeling of... feeling my way.

I think it was a tip-toeing into the craft.

And, of course, this is something that...

a lot of aspiring writers don't quite get,

that there is a considerable craft.

This is not just something that happens.

And in your generation of women, there was a divide

between those who defined themselves as feminists

and those who actually often quite vigorously rejected that definition.

Which side were you on?

Oh, very much the feminist side. Very much.

The striving, the working.

You know, I think it was Frank Field who said

that work was good for us. Wasn't it him?

-I think it was.

-Well, I think he's dead right.

I think he's dead right. I think work is incredibly good for us.

And I think writers are hugely lucky

that as long as our palsied hands can clutch a pen, on we go.

I mean, look at PD James.

Mm. At the time we speak, 93 and working on a new novel.

Exactly. Exactly.

No, it is... I think probably, she's right,

it is a kind of calling.

But it is a companion, you know.

You're always a bit of an outsider if you're a writer.

You're a watcher, you're an observer.

Because that's the part of yourself that you have to train

to be acutely noticing of everything.

And to put those...

Not exactly reinvent the humanity you see,

but put it together in a different pattern.

Sort of slightly change the picture in a kaleidoscope.

But one of the things that always fascinated me about your fiction

is that when you're personally,

you were going through something very difficult,

divorce or stepchildren, illness, whatever,

that thing that Graham Greene said about the splinter of ice

that the writer has to have that can stand back and think,

"I will record this and I will use it," did you think like that?

No, it was instinctive. It was completely instinctive.

It's only looking back that I can make the patterns.

As I think one often can.

You can make something much tidier of life in retrospect

than it actually is while it's happening,

when it's all random and arbitrary

and seems to be so very unstructured.

But looking back, you think, "Ah, yes. Now, that was leading there."

When we look at the way your fiction worked out,

you were divorced in the early '80s

and then in the later '80s you started writing contemporary fiction.

Was one an influence on the other?

I don't think it was, really. No.

I think I'd got to a matured point about writing.

And I must say, I was encouraged by my second husband

to have a go at contemporary fiction.

And I wrote a novel called The Choir, which, in a way...

Looking back, it looks to me like a bit of a halfway house.

I couldn't quite leave the idea of history and research behind.

I couldn't launch myself really confidently

into contemporary life.

So it was a sort of pastiche, I suppose,

of a Trollope novel, in a way.

I wouldn't quite write it that way now.

The rural setting, having grown up in the Cotswolds,

that was clearly an influence on that,

but was that conscious that they were going to be largely set,

at least at first, in the countryside?

Not really. It was more a kind of technical choice.

Because I was going to look at quite small groups

of people with a particular dilemma

that was preoccupying them.

And they were going to be under the microscope.

And I had the feeling in the early books

that if I were to set these dilemmas in a city street,

they would be neither here nor there.

But if you set it in a village, in a community of 300 people,

everything was extraordinarily visible in a way that, in a village,

I mean, people have tumble dryers now,

but when I was first writing these "modern" novels 25 years ago,

you know, a washing line told you everything you needed to know

about the owner of those clothes, or all of them, even the order

in, you know, how random was the hanging out?

Was it in colour sequence, et cetera?

So that idea of a community closely watching each other,

I mean, it's evident in Lark Rise To Candleford.

It's evident in Cider With Rosie.

This tiny community with its eye out upon each other all the time.

A great supportiveness, accompanied by a perfectly terrifying prurience.

In the way that a crime writer would think,

"What is the crime going to be? Where will the body be?

"What will the method of murder be?"

You were looking for a dilemma, a domestic or social dilemma

that gave you some kind of narrative traction.

Yes, the traction is exactly the word.

Something to kind of latch on to.

Because I know, in many reviews,

the word they love throwing at me as the ultimate insult, is cliche.

In my view, Mark, a cliche is only a cliche

if it's happening in someone else's life.

If it's happening in your life,

it's the first time in the history of the universe.

So if it's redundancy,

it's sexual betrayal,

it's childbirth, nobody's ever had a baby before.

Nobody's been dumped this way before.

Nobody has suddenly found themselves

without a job and a family to support.

It's brand-new, every time it happens to somebody.

And I'm trying to get that sense of the horror, the freshness,

the vivacity, the reality of these things eternally happening.

And they do.

It is very interesting, that.

I was in an office once where someone came in and said that

their husband had bought a sports car and run off with a younger woman

and someone said, "What a cliche!"

And you think, "Well, it's hardly the best thing you can say to someone!"

Because it isn't. It's their life falling apart.

It is. Yes, it is. It is.

And so it's trying to get this sense of the shock every time it happens.

Leo!

I'm trying to separate divorcing Alan and being with you.

You've made me see clearly that I can't go on as I am.

But I have to be sure that I'm marrying you

for your sake, for OUR own sake. Do you understand?

No. What does that mean?

Well, I have to be by myself for a while.

I see. There's no thought for me?

You're trying to make me feel guilty, just like Alan does.

Well, I'm not going to take it from you, either.

I am NOT going to stagger around under a burden of gratitude

and grieve any more!

DOOR SLAMS

Another big career turning point, 1994-95,

you had, and few writers have brought this off,

you had three big TV series in close succession.

A Village Affair, The Choir, The Rector's Wife.

At that time you were married to a screenwriter, Ian Curteis,

who adapted The Choir.

Had you thought about screen possibilities?

No, no. And I still don't, you know.

If they work, then they do.

To be perfectly candid, I'd rather people read the book

than watch the telly because I think, as with, say, Dickens,

I think a lot of people, having watched that superb BBC series,

I think a lot of people think they've read Bleak House.

And they haven't. They've just seen an admirable television adaptation.

And I'd really rather people read,

because what your imagination does,

how you take a book into your own consciousness and make it yours,

you know, this curious business of possession of a work of fiction,

I don't think you can possibly replicate on the screen

because a screen is essentially passive.

And the thing about reading a novel where you really are involved

is that you are engaged.

You come away slightly changed by having read that.

You know, you can look back, I'm sure you can,

there are various milestones in your life, various books

that you just know you're not the same the other side of.

And that, I think, continues to be abidingly true.

So I don't think that you take in on the screen

quite what you take in on the printed page.

There is something about holding this physical object,

that makes it yours, that makes it part of your DNA,

part of your maturing, part of your enriching.

Although I first read Trollope,

the other Trollope, after seeing Barchester Towers on TV

when I was a teenager and I mean, that is so - it can work that way.

Also in career terms,

if you have three TV adaptations in the space of a couple of years,

-it changes your entire readership and profile.

-It does.

It does. No, it certainly does.

Whether that is quite the same as the loyal body of people

who've bought the books now for, you know, nearly quarter of a century,

which is absolutely astonishing to me.

"Just below the picture of the Queen

"was the neat brown head of the lady in the grey suit

"and gold stud earrings who was, Rufus's mother said, the registrar.

"Being a registrar meant you could marry people to each other.

"This registrar, who had smiled at Rufus and said, "Hello, dear",

"was going to marry Rufus's mother in a minute.

"To Matthew.

"Rufus did not let his stare slide sideways from the registrar

"to include his mother and Matthew.

"Matthew had a grey suit on, and a yellow flower in his buttonhole

"and he was half a head taller than Rufus's mother.

"He was also, and above all things, not Rufus's father."

You were sometimes, because of writing contemporary fiction,

you were dealing in fiction with experiences that you had,

being a stepmother in Other People's Children,

a woman becoming very professionally successful in The Men And The Girls.

Were there ever difficulties with family members over this? I mean,

all writers have this, people saying, "That's about me, that's about us."

I think you, you know, you can't cherry-pick it, really,

you can't say, you know,

I've been through divorce, I've been through childbirth

and that's there in that book and there in that book,

but I think my whole approach to writing and the subject matter

of what I was writing about

was enriched and enlarged by everything I'd been through

and when it came to writing the book about stepfamilies,

I did ask my stepsons and they saw the manuscript before anybody did,

well, all four children did, my own daughters and my stepsons.

I don't think the...my own success

was to the taste of either husband, actually.

You were also writing in The Men And The Girls

-about being married to an older man, which you were at the time.

-Yes.

So you were getting, literally, close to home in those circumstances.

It was quite near the knuckle.

In fact, looking back, I wonder at my nerve.

I don't think it was very tactful,

looking back, I mean, I'm not sorry I wrote that book

but I probably shouldn't have written it then!

And it did cause trouble, did it?

Not that particular book, no,

just the sort of gradual rising profile did.

And this is, as I say,

we mentioned this earlier, but it is a fascinating area, this,

it's just, you have, in that sense,

you have suffered in personal relationships for your success.

Yes, yes, I would say I had,

but then, you know, it is roundabouts and swings.

It's never a door shuts but another opens

but they don't do it at the same time, which is so maddening.

There've been incredible other rewards

but they have mostly been the rewards of liberty,

the rewards of being free

so that I can look round a circle of friends that I have now,

a lot of whom I couldn't possibly introduce to one another

cos they couldn't bear one another

and that has often proved to be the case

but they satisfy different aspects of me.

I think I probably have a fuller,

richer, more entertaining and varied life now than I ever had,

I mean, the last 15 years, without question.

Was the writing ever cathartic

if you were writing when you were going through difficult times,

heading up to a divorce, after a divorce,

would writing about women in such situations or similar ones,

would that ever help you?

No, no, it was almost the reverse. In fact, the second divorce,

I couldn't write at all for quite a long time,

it was taking every kind of energy.

I remember Susan Hill saying to me once that one of the difficulties

for women was everything came out of the same creative well,

you know, writing, relationships,

babies, everything, so if the well got seriously depleted

there was really nothing to be done about it.

And I think it was just a question of waiting and recovering

and I think that was probably about, it was a couple of years,

and I expect, I can't accurately remember,

but I would expect I got quite frightened and quite dismayed

that I wasn't going to be able to do it again.

In fact, I found I could in many ways do it rather better,

but that again, you see, that's down to this feeling of liberty,

of feeling not being constrained by obligation to anyone else,

by manners, by...you know,

the courtesies that inevitably exist within a relationship

where you're trying to be considerate.

Do you regard your marriages as failures

or in that popular American phrase, successes while they lasted?

Bit of both, I think. Um...

I couldn't bear not to be a mother

and now a grandmother. I mean,

those relationships have been a infinite richness

and satisfaction and pleasure to me, and still are,

and watching my daughters develop their own significant careers

has been, you know, just absolutely joyful stuff.

So I think I'm not sorry I did them

but I wouldn't do it again.

And have you, I was going to say,

have you given up on men and marriage?

I don't think I need to be married again.

I don't think there's any point.

What about... You don't have to tell me if you don't want to,

what about men? Have you had it with men?

I've had quite a long relationship,

never lived together,

and see each other in as far as...

in as much as we want to and that kind of thing

and it's been, it's now 12 or 13 years.

It's quite, quite a long time.

Also creative, a musician, younger,

but it's not...

It's not...

It's not an obligation.

I mean, of course, there's an obligation of kindness

and interest and supportiveness, but it isn't that kind of...

..endlessly dancing round the eggshells of potential offence

or possibility of upstaging

or diminishment or, you know...

And at no point with this younger musician

have you or he thought, "We should move in together or get married"?

No, no, no, she said! No!

You'll get like Liz Jones, the journalist who had "Rock Star",

-that man that she was going out with.

-Yes.

-So people will speculate,

but the kind of fiction you write,

I suppose it's one of the benefits of this

that the stages of life as they go on

when you wrote Daughters-In-Law, for example,

becoming a grandmother,

being in a relationship where you don't live together,

they're all things that could provoke plots, actually.

Yes, they are. They all, they are.

I mean, when journalists say to me, as they endlessly do,

"Where do you get your ideas?"

I have to say, well, you know, it could be the supermarket queue

and as long as human nature goes on behaving as it's behaving

I shall never ever run out of ideas.

And going back to this point about how much is autobiographical,

some things are, but in a very diffused way.

I don't think I've ever tried to take anybody out of real life

and put them in a book. I mean, apart from anything else,

I think you have to be as skilled as Evelyn Waugh to do that

because that's an extraordinary accomplishment.

The situation, though, the situation of stepchildren, daughters-in-law,

you will take, I mean, frequently you will take a situation,

a soldier's wife, a situation from real life.

Yes, it's always from real life, which is why I still do the research

because a lot of those readers out there are going to know

about the area of life I've written about far better than I do

and I don't want them to stumble in their belief in the authenticity

of what they're reading,

so I do the research to get it as accurate as I possibly can

to whatever part of life or situation I'm writing about.

And that has taken me into areas that, I mean,

I wouldn't have believed how fascinated I could get

about the structure of a regiment

and exactly how you take a gun to pieces and that kind of thing

and this new novel set in the potteries,

almost every novel has taken me into some sort of area,

working in a supermarket, working in a refuge for battered women,

you know, it's all been unbelievably enlarging

and I like to be able to go off and do this thing without sort of...

having to ask permission or leave something in the freezer,

you know, I just do it.

"Ashley shrugged. "She had to carry the can, didn't she?

"I mean, she was the one who actually had to say it to Ma.

"I know she offered but it must have been horrible to have to do,

"to have to say to your own mother,

"'Look, you've got to give up complete control of the company,

"'you've got to get used to the idea of stepping aside.'"

"Jesus! Daniel said furiously.

"What is all this? What are you talking about?"

"Ashley looked at him

"and then she unfolded her arms and put the car key into the ignition.

"She said, not especially warmly, "So you don't see?"

"No, I do not," Dan said with emphasis.

"Perhaps we shouldn't expect you to."

"What? What?!"

"She turned to look at him.

"Well," she said, "you can't be expected to feel what we feel,

"can you? I mean, you can't help it, Dan. Of course you can't.

"But you're not family, really. Are you?"

The potteries novel which ties up with some of the things

we've talked about in some of the earlier books,

that's about women, women bread winners.

It is, woman as bread winners.

Well, I think it's nearly, it's over 25% of the women in this country now

earn more than the men they live with

and I think there'll be more of them.

There will always be those who would rather opt for the gilded cage

and when somebody says to me that she intends to marry for money

I have to point out that it is a gilded cage

with the emphasis on the cage. There is a price to be paid for this.

Anthony Trollope, your literary namesake, was famously fluent,

as you know, he would finish one novel, draw a line, start another one

and then go and run a post office.

Leaving out the post office bit, are you an easy writer?

It's not as easy as it was, because

I think, two things... I mean, obviously, when you start writing,

the tank is full to overflowing, so the tank, it's still got a lot in it

but it's closer to the bottom than it used to be.

Also, I think one's standards get more exacting

and my standards are very much dictated by these enormously

loyal readers. I mean, if people have been reading me now

for more than 20 years, you know, they do deserve not to be let down

so there is an anxiety that

the book will be of sufficient quality for them.

I think you have to always remember

that...this is in my view, anyway,

writers are not poets and philosophers and inventors,

we are interpreters and translators.

We are taking something out of the great ether of human experience

and translating it and making it digestible

for the people who are going to be reading it.

-Joanna Trollope, thank you.

-Thank you.

MUSIC: "(Now and Then There's) A Fool Such I" by Elvis Presley