Jilly Cooper, Joanna Trollope and Sophie Kinsella all changed the genre. A new generation of novelists are doing the same and sales are soaring
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t last, the perception of popular fiction by women as “silly novels by lady novelists”, as George Eliot sniffily put it back in 1856, is changing. Next year, the British Book Awards will recognise romantic fiction for the first time. The recognition is long overdue.
This welcome news came in the same week as the deaths of two doyennes of the form, Joanna Trollope and, at just 55, Sophie Kinsella, only a couple of months after the loss of national treasure Dame Jilly Cooper. Between them these publishing power houses produced more than 100 books, sold millions of copies, and inspired hit films and TV series, most recently last year’s star-studded adaptation of Cooper’s 1985 Riders.
Few writers have such a defining impact that they create a whole new genre: the bonkbuster, or Aga saga, as the novels of Cooper and Trollope patronisingly came to be known. The first of Kinsella’s mega-selling Shopaholic novels in 2000 followed hot on the heels of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones and the birth of “chick-lit”.
