"I don't always set stories in villages, more often in towns. But always in smallish communities because the characters' actions are more visible there, and the dramatic tension is heightened"
About this Quote
Small places make for loud lives. Joanna Trollope is laying out a craft principle that doubles as a social diagnosis: the smaller the community, the fewer places to hide. In a village or a market town, behavior becomes public property, not because people are uniquely nosy, but because proximity turns private choices into shared weather. You can feel that logic in her phrasing: "more visible" is the engine; "dramatic tension" is the payoff. She is describing a narrative technology built from geography.
The intent is practical: she wants a setting that functions like a pressure cooker. In cities, characters can vanish into anonymity and reinvent themselves at will; consequences disperse. In "smallish communities", repercussions loop back fast. One affair, one financial slip, one unkind remark at the school gate becomes a plot point because it becomes a rumor, then a reputation, then a constraint. That tight feedback system is how Trollope builds drama without melodrama: the stakes are social, cumulative, and plausible.
The subtext is quietly political. Visibility is a form of surveillance, and surveillance is never neutral. Small communities can offer belonging, but they also enforce norms, punish deviation, and make "choice" feel expensive. Trollope, writing in the tradition of English domestic realism, uses the town not as quaint scenery but as an instrument that reveals class, manners, and power. The context here is a novelist explaining why her work so often circles families, marriages, and local networks: not because they are smaller stories, but because they are stories where cause and effect can be seen in real time.
The intent is practical: she wants a setting that functions like a pressure cooker. In cities, characters can vanish into anonymity and reinvent themselves at will; consequences disperse. In "smallish communities", repercussions loop back fast. One affair, one financial slip, one unkind remark at the school gate becomes a plot point because it becomes a rumor, then a reputation, then a constraint. That tight feedback system is how Trollope builds drama without melodrama: the stakes are social, cumulative, and plausible.
The subtext is quietly political. Visibility is a form of surveillance, and surveillance is never neutral. Small communities can offer belonging, but they also enforce norms, punish deviation, and make "choice" feel expensive. Trollope, writing in the tradition of English domestic realism, uses the town not as quaint scenery but as an instrument that reveals class, manners, and power. The context here is a novelist explaining why her work so often circles families, marriages, and local networks: not because they are smaller stories, but because they are stories where cause and effect can be seen in real time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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