Joanna Trollope webchat – your questions answered on libraries, Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen

Can I thank you ALL for wonderful questions and I am very sorry if you asked a question there was no time to reply to. It has been a great experience and I am very appreciative of your participation.
My latest book, City of Friends is out now! Published by Mantle.

Can I start by thanking you hugely for making me into a present so often! I can't think of a more appealing use for my books and I am truly grateful.

Quite honestly, I don't think there has ever been a novel I have abandoned or felt unable to write, even if there have been cases where I make many false starts at the opening. I have certainly had to abandon a couple of non-fiction projects but that I have always put down to non-fiction not being my natural metier. And being half a Scot, I find all wastage very hard to bear, and those abandoned projects are still slightly uncomfortable to endure, I have to admit!

I suppose my conclusion is that non-fiction isn't a sufficiently liberating genre for me. So having to abandon a couple of ideas is more irritating than anything, but that I have never really had to check myself or endure being checked in the genre where I am genuinely most liberated, which is that of fiction.

I have to say, that the idea of being a present is supremely gratifying and also, I have to add, largely and typically, female. Not only do women buy over 65% of books bought in this country, but they are known to be present givers with books as the present.

We come back to the image put out by the media with this question really, don't we? I have never limited the range of my novels and neither have the readers. It is much more the way my readers and novels are portrayed that has defined me, as a novelist.

So I imagine that readers, being like all of us, cannot help but be influenced by what they read in the press. There is an inevitable slant and limitation. But I think, equally, it is possible to override these tired, old stereotypes and present a writer, even after all these years, as someone who speaks to a far wider readership and age group than has been the tired, old case!

You actually hit on exactly the reaction among readers that I am hoping for! I never want to tell you, as readers, what to think or even what I think. But what I am trying to do with all these novels is to start the conversation and to get you wondering. And the fact that you are still wondering about Anna Bouverie fills me with writerly satisfaction!

I very much doubt that I would ever write a sequel to any novel, because once I get to the end of a novel, not only have I lived intensely and often very exasperatedly with these characters for a year or two, but I need them to start doing what I have created them to do - namely get the readership thinking and wondering and talking about the people and the issues contained in the novel.

So thank you very much for being my perfect reader.

The Austen Project was dreamt up by a very clever editor at Harper Collins who is now at Faber. Her idea was to emphasise the timelessness of Jane Austen's characterisation by taking stories that had been written before 1815 and transposing them to 2013. So the aim was not so much to showcase modern writers, as to display the eternal genius of Jane Austen.

I not only think my novels would be very honoured to be rewritten in 200 years time, I think they would benefit! There is, after all, nothing new to say about the human condition that Sophocles or Shakespeare haven't brilliantly said already. All writers do is reinterpret or translate those eternal truths about humanity for their own times. I am not of the school of writers who believes that we are inventors, as you will gather! And that explains why, when it came to updating Sense and Sensibility, I not only stuck to Jane's narrative and characterisation like paint, I also stuck to her treatment of her characters. In Sense and Sensibility there are only two characters she does not tease - one is Elinor Dashwood and the other is Colonel Brandon - and I have treated them in the same way Jane does herself.

I started the project thinking she was a brilliant novelist. I ended the project believing she was a complete genius and nothing that has happened since has caused me to revise that opinion.

I'm a huge fan of the writer known at home as 'the Real Trollope'. He died in 1882, and when you think that that was only about 20 years before the theories of Sigmund Freud began to hold sway across Europe, it makes you realise how unbelievable psychological and perceptive Trollope was, however unenlightened, being a child of his times, he was in some respects!

I think his novels - or shall we say, the best of his novels - are absolutely outstanding, particularly when it comes to the interior monologues of most of his female characters. He was an outstanding chronicler of church and state, of course. But he was also a most astute observer and portrayer of that condition, and only future open to gently born girls, which was marriage. It is interesting, for example, that Dickens, for all his brilliance, was absolutely hopeless at writing about sex in any credible way. But Trollope, who lead a much less exciting romantic life than Dickens, was brilliant, particularly at sexual revulsion.

He failed to earn quite as much as Dickens in his lifetime, which he minded very much indeed! But he would love the fact that he is so cherished these days as a perceptive writer. I wish I could claim direct descendancy - but in all truth, I can't. The best I can do is to tell you that I am a collateral descendent, even if I am the first member of the family to write since he died. He comes from the very posh Trollopes, who lived in Casewick Hall, in south Lincolnshire. My lot, who were distinctly below the sort, came from north Lincolnshire. I'm afraid that is the closest, apart from the surname, that I can claim!

All the direct Trollope descedants are in Australia - descedants of his second son Fred, who immigrated to become a sheep farmer, which I am sorry to say, was absolutely hopeless and had to be bailed out twice by his successful and long suffering father...

This is almost part of question one. I welcome any chance to emphasise how vital readers are, to the whole creative process, as far as I am concerned. If I didn't do reading events at book shops and festivals, I wouldn't get to meet the public. And of course, readers endlessly ask me the same questions - why wouldn't they?! - but that is just part, not only of the process, but natural and inevitable human curiosity.

What I am trying to get across in all the novels is that we're all in the same boat and nobody is alone in any situation, however dreadful, that they find themselves in. That is one of the enormous and unique consolations of fiction.

We have never needed libraries more. It is not just literacy either, although when the OECD did a literary survey in 2014 of the 24 most developed countries in the world, the UK came in at 22, which is both extremely worrying and also extremely shameful.

The modern library needs to be repositioned in the community as a safe space, the kind of space that perhaps a church occupied once in medieval England, where not only can literacy and research be pursued, but also, there is comfortable, welcoming access to WiFi, which needs to be rolled out to every single corner, no matter how remote, of the UK.

I should also point out that public libraries cost a tiny fraction of local government budgets - but they are vulnerable, because they are such soft targets when there is a huge public and political outcry about areas like social care. In fact, I think public libraries are an integral part of social care. And in the state we're in, we'll be grossly impoverished if we don't look after our public library service for the future.

I always say to anyone aspring to write fiction that the talent you have to train in yourself are your powers of observation. You have to school yourself to notice. So I always recommend would-be novelists to have a spiralled, hardback notebook that they take everywhere with them, in which they keep a journal - not a day-to-day 'dear diary' - but a journal of everything they notice. For example, snatches of conversation they overhear, quotations from beloved plays, poems or books, reproductions of paintings or photographs they particularly, like, old fashioned news clippings, ideas and descriptions that come into their minds. Absolutely anything that allow the imagination to flourish and means that what you are looking for is not the obvious stuff, but the telling nuance that gives you an idea of the real person underneath the presentation they give for public consumption.
I think to be a word of mouth author is incredibly hard now. And that success has been distorted by publishers reliance on the megasellers. And that is a great pity, as far as modern literature is concerned. But I also have faith that the pendulum will swing back towards quality, rather than quantity. And that the more niche areas of writing will be come valued in the way they have in the music industry.

Which leads me on to, again, the rather lazy label of 'romance'. Which seems to me strangely old fashioned. Because it suggests women are primarily, if not solely, defined by their romantic lives, which in this world of work and exercise of all female talents, very retrospective as well as narrowly unintelligent. So I would always prefer to be described as a writer of relationships, rather than just one area of relationships which are those to do with the heart - but I can never be at all confident that, particularly the tabloid media, is even troubling to listen!

They certainly will! Reading digitally I find, is extremely frustrating. I need page numbers, not the percentage of the amount I've read. I need to be able to flick back and while judging all the literary prizes in the past, I find I've needed the physical heft and appearance of the book in my hand, because a Kindle homogenises everything in a way that is inimical to be memorable.
I notice on public transport that mostly people under 30 who are not glued to their phone are reading physical books. IN fact, the only people reading on e-readers are my age group!
You can not furnish a room digitally. And reading digitally only gives you the license to read a particular book it does not give you the book as a possession. So you can't not leave your library to a descendent, because it would not be yours to leave if it were a technological library.....

I don't have a cardboard cutout of an ideal reader in mind while I'm writing but I definitely include the dramatic effect on the reader all the time I'm scribbling. And I literally do scribble, by hand. I have always written by hand. I can't write novels on a computer.
I'm describing the kind of movie that I can see and hear in my head while I'm writing. Therefore, the dramatic effect of this on the audience, the reader, is absolutely crucial to the whole process. Without readers, I not only wouldn't be where I am. There'd be no point in my writing! To me, readers are a part of the process.

Hello all! I'm here now.