Joanna Trollope (; born 9 December 1943) is an English writer. She has also written under the pseudonym of Caroline Harvey. Her novel Parson Harding's Daughter won in 1980 the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association. Biography Early life Trollope was born on 9 December 1943 in her grandfather's rectory in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, England, daughter of Rosemary Hodson and Arthur George Cecil Trollope. Her father was an Oxford University classics graduate who became head of a small building society. Her mother was an artist and writer. Her father was away for war service in India when she was born; he returned when she was three. The family settled in Reigate, Surrey. Trollope has a younger brother and sister. She was educated at Reigate County School for Girls, gaining scholarship to St Hugh's College, Oxford in 1961. She read English. Her father was of the same family as the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope; she is his fifth-generation niece, and is a cousin of the writer and broadcaster James Trollope. Of inheriting the name, she has said: Career From 1965 to 1967, she worked at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. While a civil servant, she researched Eastern Europe and the relations between China and the developing world. From 1967 to 1979, she was employed in a number of teaching posts before she became a writer full-time in 1980. Trollope began writing historical romances under the pseudonym of Caroline Harvey, the first names of her father's parents. She formed the view that: "It was the wrong genre for the time." Encouraged by her second husband, Ian Curteis, she switched to the contemporary fiction for which she has become known. The Choir, published in 1987, was her first contemporary novel. The Rector's Wife, published in 1991, displaced Jeffrey Archer from the top of the hardback bestseller lists. As an explanation, she said in 2006: "except for thrillers there was nothing in the middle ground of the traditional novel, which is where I think I am." In 1992, only Jilly Cooper's Polo and Archer's As the Crow Flies were stronger paperback bestsellers. "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. Often described as Aga sagas, for their rural themes, only two of Trollope's novels (by 2006) actually feature an Aga.