She was educated at Reigate County School for Girls,[5] gaining scholarship to St Hugh's College, Oxford in 1961.

Trollope began writing historical romances under the pseudonym of Caroline Harvey, the first names of her father's parents.

"I think my books are just the dear old traditional novel making a quiet comeback", she told Geraldine Bedell in a 1993 interview for The Independent on Sunday.

[4] The term's entry in The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009) states that "by no means all her work fits the generally comforting implications of the label".

[11] Rejecting the label as not being accurate, Trollope told Lisa Allardice, writing for The Guardian in 2006: "Actually, the novels are quite subversive, quite bleak.

[12][13] Trollope told Bedell in 1993 that her fiction does "the things the traditional novel has always done" by mirroring reality and exploring "people's emotional lives".

Trollopian action takes place in large village houses, at vast kitchen tables; her doctors, vicars, solicitors and craft-gallery owners may worry about money, as her own parents did, but they don't have any social anxieties: they are invited for drinks at the big house as a matter of course.

[7] A Spanish Lover: In The New York Times Betsy Groban wrote, ″Her story is filled with lively, astute and always affectionate insights into the abiding issues of marriage, motherhood and materialism, not to mention the destructive power of envy and the importance of living one's own life.

″[17] Marrying the Mistress: ″With its sharp eye, light tone and sly, witty pace, Joanna Trollope's ninth novel delivers all the ingredients of romantic comedy, yet ends with a subtle, dark twist.″[18] Friday Nights: Heather Thompson of The Guardian called Friday Nights "a light but insightful look at a rather conventional cast of characters.

If I was any one of the characters imprisoned in the murky jelly of this novel, I'd be straight on to the Adoption Agency, demanding to be re-settled with another creator.

[20]On 14 May 1966,[3] Trollope married a city banker, David Roger William Potter; the couple had two daughters, Louise and Antonia, divorcing in 1983.