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St Hugh’s pays tribute to alumna and bestselling novelist Joanna Trollope who has died aged 82

We are deeply saddened to learn of the death of our alumna Joanna Trollope (English Language and Literature, 1962) on 11 December 2025, and send our sincerest condolences to her family.

When Joanna completed her English studies at Oxford, she worked in the Foreign Office and then retrained as a teacher before becoming a full-time author in 1980. Joanna went on to publish more than 30 novels over a career that spanned more than four decades. Originally writing historical romances under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey, her focus later moved to contemporary fiction, creating perceptive stories about modern family life and relationships in rural and suburban England. Her breakthrough came with The Rector’s Wife in 1991, which became a bestseller and a television adaptation, cementing her place in British literary life.

St Hugh’s Principal, Michele Action said, ‘We are extremely proud to have had such a prolific author as part of St Hugh’s community. Joanna will be remembered as a distinguished alumna whose work touched countless lives, inspiring readers with stories that acknowledged the importance of everyday life.’

St Hugh’s is extremely privileged to be in the possession of a wonderful passage that Joanna wrote about her time at St Hugh’s for a College newsletter which reads:

‘In early 1962, I won a tiny tiny scholarship to St Hugh’s – a Gamble Scholarship worth £40 a year, and my entire grammar school was so astonished that everyone had a day off to recover from the surprise (including me). That October, equipped with my new, stiff gown (it never really softened up or felt like mine) and a pile of amateurishly made cushions and bedspreads etc (I remember a lot of lime green cotton with dismay…) I took possession of a gloomy little room at the top of MBA with sloping ceilings and a scruffy little kitchen at the end of the corridor where I was boiling a kettle when someone flew in to tell me that President Kennedy had been assassinated.

‘St Hugh’s in those days was very happy, very cosy, and not at all emancipated – men had to be out by ten, and signed out at that. The food was appalling, the teaching was terrific (Rachel Trickett was my moral tutor) and the garden vast and lovely. Our Principal was Dame Kathleen Kenyon, the great digger-up of Jericho, a genial foursquare figure in a stout grey flannel suit, who, despite the fact that she was longing to be back in the Middle East, trowel in hand, liked us girls, and gave us excellent advice about falling in love : “Now just remember that for most of you, this time at Oxford affords you a unique freedom from domestic cares, so fall in love all you like but for Heavens’ sake, don’t start cooking for them and washing their socks”.

‘That female sanctuary was perfect for friendship nurturing, and even if the atmosphere was more than a bit schooly, it was also serious about the calibre and value of the female mind, not least because we were taught by women who had had to battle for their rightful place in academe. It was almost as if the brown linoleum and bossy notice boards and rice puddings were deliberately aimed to remind us that it was the Life of the Mind that mattered, and it was truly luxurious to be treated as properly intelligent and capable of even more. Satisfying, interesting, profitable days…we were lucky to have them.’