Joanna Trollope's first novels were meticulously researched historical romances. It was not until she began writing about contemporary women in provincial settings that she gained a wide readership and critical attention. Two of these later books, The Choir (1988) and The Rector's Wife (1991), were adapted for television and broadcast in the United States on PBS, which enhanced Trollope's burgeoning reputation in America. Her nonhistorical fiction, written since 1988, explores the restrictions placed on women by family and small-town society in contemporary Britain; she is particularly interested in the ways in which the traditional parameters of church and squirearchy still obtain for women in English provincial life. In this way Trollope is a conscious inheritor of the great tradition of novels about English village society, which includes the work of Jane Austen and George Eliot, as well as Trollope's Victorian forebear, the novelist Anthony Trollope. While her characters wrestle with ordinary...