‘He reflected, and not for the first time, that it was a great pity he suffered from a middle-class male reluctance to thump his wife’: Backlash, misogyny, and the consequences of self-fulfilment in the fiction of Joanna Trollope

Abstract

Joanna Trollope began her career writing historical novels in the early 1980s, but it is for her contribution to the Aga-saga genre that she is best known. Trollope is synonymous with this popular category of women's writing, selling approximately 500,000 copies per title. Despite Trollope's popularity (and that of the Aga-saga more broadly) little research has been done on these novels. As part of a renewed interest by feminist critics in ‘women's genres’, Janine Liladhar (2000) and Deborah Philips (2006 [2007]) have done something to remedy this absence of scholarship, discussing Trollope and the Aga-saga in relation to romance and melodrama respectively. They characterize Aga-sagas as ‘reassuring’ narratives that, whilst often depicting women's dissatisfaction and frustration, always offer a contented image of domesticity. This article, however, argues that these accounts of Trollope's work have overlooked the negative depictions of women that run beneath the novels' celebration of domestic femininity. I maintain that at the heart of these novels is the suggestion that the price of women's pursuit of self-fulfilment is damage to children, the emasculation of husbands, and the dissolution of relationships.