SOURCE: Massingberd, Hugh. “Loads of Fun but Not a Barrel of Laughs.” Spectator 284, no. 8948 (5 February 2000): 35.

In the following review, Massingberd describes Marrying the Mistress as a “remarkable” novel about intergenerational relationships and family dynamics.

‘I'm one of those rare chaps,’ a genial Staffordshire landowner once told me, ‘who can boast that my mother was a Trollope.’ Arf-arf. Such gags would, I fear, fall into the ‘hearty’ category of male speech occasionally noted in Joanna Trollope's remarkable new novel [Marrying the Mistress] about the knock-on effects of a grandfather's affair on the ‘dynamics’ of family life.

The title itself has echoes of the notorious quip by Sir James Goldsmith (‘When a man marries his mistress, he automatically creates a vacancy’), but anyone who had expected an Aga saga of wronged womanhood and beastly masculinity has a startling surprise in store. In my ignorance, I had imagined Miss Trollope to...