BESTSELLING novelist Joanna Trollope believes women can have the career and the children - and shouldn't feel guilty about it.

The vital thing, as she tells Hannah Stephenson, is that we support each other's choices, whatever they are Joanna Trollope greets me looking the epitome of poise and elegance, her highlighted hair beautifully coiffured, her tiny frame enveloped in an elegant cream shirt and tailored leather trousers, her no doubt meticulously pedicured feet encased in immaculate Chelsea boots.

Famed for her family dramas which always feature contemporary social issues, flawed characters and tangled relationships in bestselling novels including The Rector's Wife, Marrying The Mistress and Other People's Children, along with her reworking last year of Jane Austen's Sense & Sensibility, she's used to writing about vulnerable people.

And despite her perfectionist nature, she says she feels empathy with many of her less stoic characters.

"I have some sense of anxiety and vulnerability. I don't strike people as vulnerable because since I was a child, I've been terribly good at seeming infinitely more confident than I feel."

Her latest book, Balancing Act, about a family pottery business founded by matriarch Susie who employs her three daughters in the firm, throws up all sorts of complications.

One of the interesting social issues she raises is that of women being the main breadwinners and husbands staying at home to look after the children. But then, men are so much more hands-on than they used to be, she reflects.

"There's a zeitgeist that I sense," she says of her ideas. "In this case, it was discovering that over 25% of the workforce in this country are now women who live with men they may out-earn."

Oxford-educated Trollope, who married her first husband at 22, recalls that when she was a young mother, attitudes were quite different.

"My older generation was very disapproving, because it was felt I should be behind the front door with his slippers in my mouth, wagging my tail. But a lot of my university contemporaries were working, so it was normal."

"My then husband was perfectly all right with my working, as long as it was containable," she continues. "I don't think either of my husbands were entirely comfortable with any success I had - it made them uneasy. And I'm not going to elaborate on that."

The multi-millionaire author, daughter of a rector and distant niece of Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, divorced Potter and married her second husband, TV dramatist Ian Curteis, when she was 37. That also ended in divorce.

She's been happily living on her own for 15 years, and it's a luxury she'll never give up, she says.

"I'm not controlling of other people but I want to have my own liberty intensely. Independence is crucially important to me but it doesn't extend to wanting to control other people. I just want to be free myself."

She has been with the same partner for around 12 years and calls their relationship 'unorthodox', in that they don't live together and he is much younger than her.

"He's never been married. I think it's the right degree of liberty for both of us and I'd never consider living with somebody again.”

In Balancing Act, one of the characters happily becomes a house husband looking after their children while his ambitious wife follows her dreams.

Trollope says that house husbands today are increasingly seen as the norm.

"This 'men are from Mars, women are from Venus' approach is infinitely too black and white. There are vast numbers of men who aren't thugs and brutes, but who are nurturing, cosseting people. I also think a lot of men are truly interested in the upbringing of their children."

After writing five books in five years, Trollope will be delivering the next one in two years' time, and is involved in a number of literacy projects, but there's no thought of retirement.

"There's a dominance of women writers on the bestseller list," she enthuses. "Here come the girls!"