Best-selling English author Joanna Trollope, whose groundbreaking novel A Village Affair centered on a lesbian love story, has died at the age of 82. Trollope wrote more than 30 books, including The Rector’s Wife and Other People’s Children, publishing under her own name and the pseudonym Caroline Harvey. Though often labeled the Queen of the Aga Saga, she rejected the term as patronising, saying her work was quite subversive, quite bleak.
Her daughters, Louise and Antonia, said she was a beloved and inspirational mother who passed away peacefully at her Oxfordshire home. Released in 1989, A Village Affair follows Alice, a married woman who forms a life-changing bond with Clodagh Unwin in a small English village. The novel was adapted by ITV in 1995 and became an early, rare depiction of lesbian love on British television. Born in 1943, Trollope became a full-time writer in 1980 and later received both an Order of the British Empire and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to literature.
