04 | THE BOOKSELLER ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE
A PERFECT MATCH
Joanna Trollope joined Macmillan just under three years ago, and has since published two books under the Mantle imprint. She speaks to The Bookseller about new starts and finding the perfect balance between past and present
When Joanna Trollope signed with Macmillan in 2015, she joined a publisher with an illustrious history and a deeply rooted tradition of nurturing talent and bringing diverse voices, thinkers and backgrounds together. Trollope joined primarily because her previous editor retired, and Macmillan was the perfect size to accommodate the prolific writer. But the publisher’s legacy was also hugely attractive to her, and she derives great pleasure in following in the footsteps of those writers that have gone before. “The story of Daniel and Alexander Macmillan—you couldn’t make
it up,” she says. “Literacy was not at all common in their time, but [their] appetite for learning, for books and education, and the wish to disseminate it was so impressive. That’s the very traditional side of Macmillan, but then there’s also the Pan side, which is possibly a bit more commercial. It’s something extraordinary in the publishing world to have this great solidity of classical history on one side, and something much more mobile and up-to-date on the other.” This up-to-date approach to editing, publishing and promoting is particularly important to Trollope and complements her own approach to her novels: reflecting society, its characters and situations the way they are now, harnessing the contemporary for full effect. Whether it’s the working women in City of Friends or the couple in their sixties wanting to remarry in An Unsuitable Match, Trollope’s books are “quite subversive”, as she puts it. “They’re very contemporary and very modern. They are looking at the way we live now and all our relationships. There are different ways of looking at things, and that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to say, ‘could we get this taboo subject out in a book and just talk about it?’” Trollope clearly delights in our constant endeavour for happiness or romance—but she throws in some brilliantly observed hurdles along the way. For example, in An Unsuitable Match, money has far more influence on the “match” than we would perhaps like. Her characters’ decisions invariable split her readers, but are rooted in how society ticks.
During her research for An Unsuitable Match, for example, a solicitor revealed that over the past decade, enquiries by people over 65 wanting to remarry had increased by 33%. The key question was always how to protect individual assets, and almost no one liked the answer: a prenuptial agreement. “There is something in the human spirit, something eternally hopeful and dreaming and ambitious emotionally,” says Trollope. In fact, her working title for the book was “The Triumph of Hope”, after the famous Samuel Johnson quote (“Marriage is the triumph of
imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience”). “That says it all, that there is something in the human spirit that, as long as we have life, we have hope.” An Unsuitable Match was published in February by the Mantle imprint, and Trollope has been on tour quite a bit since then, with a prestigious spot as Author of the Day at the London Book Fair in April. She has experienced something of a professional rebirth, she reckons, with her new publishing home injecting some “fresh energy” into the look and promotion of her books. This became particularly noticeable on tour. “A lot of people on the recent book tour have said to me that they had never read one of my books before,” says Trollope, pleased that her rather outdated media image is finally being put to bed. There was a great breadth of demographics and age range at her events, she adds. “I don’t know that those in their 20s are reading anything at all, except on screens (this is a huge generalisation), but 30 upwards, they definitely are [reading my books].”
She also appreciated that her recent tour encompassed a slew of out-of-the-way independent bookshops. “It’s been very interesting going to all these places that I hardly knew existed—to all kinds of extraordinary places where there are magnificent independent bookshops. An independent bookshop brings up a high street like nothing else. A bookshop on the high street is not just a bookshop—it’s a kind of therapy centre. And the people in the community value a bookshop the way they value a public library. It’s something that anchors a community.” Libraries themselves are also still very important to Trollope. She is a tireless campaigner on their behalf, and also a trustee of the National Literacy Trust. “This zeal is underpinned by an abiding passion for education. If you can’t read and write, your life is unbelievably curtailed and limited, never mind your self-esteem. It’s education that underpins my support for libraries and everything else—it’s the feeling that this world of the mind is of unbelievable importance.”
This passion for education—for opportunity for all, for bringing different minds together, to bring out the best in everyone—could be straight out of the Macmillan founders’ playbook. “It is the best of the old, and the best of the current,” says Trollope of her publisher’s ethos. She also admires its egalitarian approach: “There are an enormous number of their current authors that I like as people hugely and I admire as writers. I feel that I’m just one among many. I don’t imagine they have a hierarchy in their minds, but all the Macmillan events I’ve been to have been very convivial. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was joining a very right thinking and energetic team—that you were joining the general flow of the river.”
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