‘I’d have liked masses more children but I was married to someone totally unfaithful so I didn’t risk it’
As she publishes her new book, the queen of Aga-Sagas lets rip on ‘unsophisticated’ men, turning her back on the shires and why marriage is no longer fit for purpose...
JOANNA Trollope is having a literal – and metaphorical – clear out. Perching her statuesque frame on a high wooden stool in a cafe around the corner from her flat in Chelsea, the novelist announces proudly that, for the first time in her life, she has all her belongings under one roof – and has never been happier
“Every earring and book, for the first time for ages,” says Oxford-educated Trollope, who is effortlessly classy in a navy suit jacket and polo neck sweater and looks far younger than her 76 years. “I’ve lived in two places for 15 years. Not any more.”
And she is revelling in being on her own. “My definition of lonely is to be in a relationship which should be intimate and you realise that actually you are a million miles apart because you don’t hold the same views about anything, about politics, about morality, about anything.”
Surprisingly for a novelist who made her name writing so-called rural AgaSagas (a title Trollope has always detested) and is reputed to be worth £15million, Trollope has dispensed with the large second home in the country and, with it, all “that stuff”.
“I have moved back full-time into my flat off the King’s Road which I bought during the swinging ‘60s when that part of London was buzzing,” she explains.
The move necessitated a spring clean. “My second husband was addicted to collecting books and I don’t think he read an awful lot of them,” she says, a mischievous grin spreading across her face.
“When I finally left him, one thing I didn’t want was an obsession with books. Now I will collect the good stuff by beloved authors, not everything by beloved authors.”
Chucked out along with the books are men themselves. After two marriages – to banker David Potter in 1966 and television dramatist Ian Curteis in 1985 – and a serious relationship with Jason Kouchak, a musician 23 years her junior,Trollope is done.
“I don’t have a terribly high opinion of men. There are some amazing men and there’s a lot in my family, but I think the average man is not terribly developed or sophisticated. I am sorry to say this,” she says, not looking in the least bit so.
“I am happy, entirely comfortable with being single and easy with it. I’m not looking for anything to happen again because I don’t want to revisit that appeasing secondary part of myself. I’ve fought to get to where I’ve got to and I’d rather just stay here, thank you.”
The appeasement she refers to is the role Trollope believes women of her generation can slip into around men because of their pre-conditioning.
“I remember when my brother came along, unconsciously knowing that I somehow came second now,” says Trollope, who was born in her grandfather’s rectory in Gloucestershire, the eldest of four children. Her father was an Oxford University classics graduate who ran a small building society and her mother was an artist.
“I am of the generation who was brought up to believe that making the world happy was my duty as a woman. Then I realised that was not the case. My husbands were both threatened by my success, particularly being of that generation.
“Growing up as they did, they had to be the supreme ones, the ones who went out and slayed the mammoth. It’s changed because the position of women has changed. It was rare for [women like] me to want to work all my life, which I have done, but with great difficulty.” The same pattern repeated itself when Trollope was living with her last beau.
“There was a terrific desire, on my part at least, to help somebody very talented achieve something, but it didn’t work. He didn’t achieve it and I got bored.”
MUM & Dad, Trollope’s 33rd book – she has written novels and historical non-fiction – explores inter-generational conflict with the tale of Monica and Gus, wealthy, elderly ex-pats who own a vineyard in southern Spain.
When Gus has a stroke, their three grown-up children arrive from England, ostensibly to help out. But within hours the family is at war, mired in disputes over everything from power of attorney to Gus’s care plan and their birthrights.
“Whatever topics I write about, all my novels have a great preoccupation with the zeitgeist coming off humanity at the time.
“Mum & Dad is the story of parents falling to pieces in a dramatic way and the demanding end of life care children who are working full time are expected to give. Society hasn’t caught up with the fact that it still expects women to do all the caring.”
Trollope says many men of her generation, like Gus, sought to control women, like Monica, by stripping them of all opportunity and freedom.
“This way of thinking dooms many minds to infantilism. It’s really about control. Men like President Trump are so worried about dominance and control,” she says.
Has #MeToo improved the situation? “Until every choice a woman makes – either to have a child, not to have a child, to be in a relationship with a man or not – doesn’t matter, we won’t have equality.
“I don’t know that we’ll ever get there. But you are only a victim if you allow yourself to be made a victim by somebody bullying who is superior to you in some way or another. You can elude the bully perfectly well.” Has she in her life?
“Oh, yes,” she says firmly, revealing later that if any of her slew of male friends, including some admirers, suggest or attempt intimacy, they get a brisk slap on the wrist.
“I don’t like it,” she says of that side of relationships. “The reverse, in fact, a kind of revulsion,” and then adds somewhat incongruously, “I don’t personally ever want to have a joint bank account again.” Trollope doesn’t do regrets – after all she has two daughters, two stepsons and nine grandchildren from her marriages – but one she does have is not having a larger family.
“I’d have liked masses more children but I was married to someone totally unfaithful so I just wasn’t going to risk it.”
The institution of marriage is, in her opinion, not fit for 21st century purpose, so does she know many happy marriages?
“No. I know quite a lot of exasperated marriages. Marriage has changed hugely, the modern marriage, post-contraception being reliable, it’s a very different matter.
“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,” she says. “But marriages are too long now. In Tudor days, a ten-year mar