85 interview with Sarah Waters (CWWN conference, University of Wales, Bangor, 22nd April 2006) Lucie Armitt

abstract Sarah Waters was born in Pembrokeshire in South Wales in 1966. She is the author of four novels, Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), Fingersmith (2003) and The Night Watch (2006). Among her many awards and nominations one can include the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (2000), Author of the Year at the British Book Awards (2003), and the South Bank Award for Literature (2003). Most recently, The Night Watch has been short-listed for the Orange Prize. It was my great pleasure to have the opportunity to interview her at the inaugural conference of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Network (CWWN), ‘For Love or Money? Contemporary Women’s Writing in the Marketplace’, which was held at the University of Wales, Bangor, in April 2006.

keywords the book industry; gay; historical fiction; historical periods; intertextuality; lesbian; literary tradition; london; the nineteen forties; the 19th century; plot; readership; storytelling; TV adaptation

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Lucie Armitt: I’m going to start with a very open question, which is, when you write, how would you describe the type of reader for whom you consider yourself to be writing, first and foremost? Sarah Waters: My instinct, when answering this, is to say that I write for myself, because when I first planned to start writing fiction at all, with Tipping the Velvet, it was very much that I wanted to write the kind of novel that I would like to read myself – and in lots of ways that’s still the case. To tease that out a bit, it means that if I’m imagining a reader at all, it is somebody with a similar collection of interests to me; which is someone who is a big reader, because the books often have references, either semi-submerged or more overt, to other novels, or perhaps to other traditions of writing, because a novel like Fingersmith was very deliberately written in the tradition of the Victorian novel of sensation, and The Night Watch invokes 1940s British Wartime fiction as a kind of backdrop. So, I suppose I’m imagining a reader who will ‘get’ that (though that’s not to say you couldn’t read the book in a completely different way) and I suppose, similarly, I’m imagining a reader who will ‘get’ the lesbian stuff, because for me, again, I think I probably situate my lesbian stories in something bigger, like an echo chamber. There are hints at other lesbian texts or traditions of representation – but that’s something that most of my readers won’t necessarily pick up on. So these two main elements are what I’m interested in pursuing as a writer because I know I would be interested, still, in encountering them as a reader. There was a moment of anxiety when I was starting The Night Watch after Fingersmith had come out and Fingersmith had done well and it had got me what suddenly felt like a much wider audience. More than ever before I was aware of an audience waiting for the next book and that was quite daunting. I had all sorts of questions in my head about the lesbian content: ‘Was it going to be lesbian enough to satisfy my lesbian fan-base?’ ‘Was it going to be too lesbian, would it alienate my straight readers, who would get sick of ‘‘all that lesbian nonsense’’?’ And that was paralysing for a while, but then I just shrugged those anxieties off and got back to asking myself ‘What do I feel passionate about, here, as a writer – and as a writer who is essentially a reader?’ Lucie Armitt: It’s interesting to hear you talk about the transition from Fingersmith to The Night Watch, because the last time you and I spoke you had just published Fingersmith and one of the things I wanted to ask you was, having published The Night Watch, how do you feel it has moved you forward as a writer? Sarah Waters: Well, The Night Watch was a lot to take on – I knew that. I wanted a change from the 19th century; I felt like I’d got to the end of a cycle of interest and so deliberately wanted to move period to see what would happen to my writing and I hadn’t really anticipated at that stage just how challenging the new terrain would be – not really in terms of the new period and the new research, Lucie Armitt

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because I’m quite comfortable doing research and getting to grips with the period – but it was much more that the period produced a different ‘feel’ of novel. It felt appropriate, for example, to write in the third person, which I’d never done before, and I had to figure out how to do it. This novel, too, has a cast of characters: it is a real ensemble piece and again I hadn’t really done that before, so I had to figure out how to do that. Hence, there were lots of challenges to face: for instance, the novel goes backwards. At times these challenges felt almost overwhelming, but it also made the book a very satisfying book to get to the end of: because I’m not in any way, now, a master of the third-person form, but I know how to do it better than I did four years ago, so that’s nice to know: it’s another resource, I suppose. I don’t know, with the next book, what form that will be in, but it’s nice to think, ‘OK, I can draw on different ways.’ I’m interested in story telling and so, with every novel, it’s nice to think that you’re learning a bit more about how to do your basic thing, which in my case is telling stories – more importantly, I suppose, figuring out what the stories are that you want to tell in the first place, and then how to tell them. So I do feel I’ve gained some experience with The Night Watch. Lucie Armitt: I want to push you a bit more on that storytelling, because one of the things I know readers love about your books is that although you are an amazingly careful researcher in terms of historical period, you are also a good old-fashioned storyteller. Plots are very important to you, and plots are often quite complex in your books, and one of the things that intrigues me – and I know this sounds a very naı¨ve question, but to what extent have you worked out all the complexities of your plots right at the beginning, or do you find that, through the process of writing, those plots evolve and almost take you by surprise? Sarah Waters: Well, actually, with the first three novels, Tipping, Affinity and Fingersmith, they got increasingly complicated, plot-wise, and I more or less did have to have the whole thing worked out in advance. I remember, years and years ago, before I ever started writing, reading about Iris Murdoch, whom I’ve always admired, and reading her saying something like that – that she had the whole novel in her head – and I thought ‘Wow! She’s got a brain the size of a planet!’ But actually, I find it’s amazing how much you can contain in your head, especially if it’s your job – it’s what I’m paid to do, after all. When I say that, Fingersmith does have a very complicated plot, but what I had in my head was the skeleton of the plot. So obviously, inevitably, scene by scene things would come along that wouldn’t necessarily surprise me (or sometimes would surprise me), but about which I would think, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea,’ and those new things would cluster around my original ideas. On the whole, however, I did have that pretty much worked out: I had to, really, because it would have been crazy to start writing that kind of novel without a sense of knowing exactly where it was going. 118

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With The Night Watch it was very unnerving for me because it didn’t work like that and all I had was a cluster of characters and the three-part backwards movement – because the novel goes from 1947, to 1944, to 1941 – and I had the broadest sense of what had happened to my characters, but it really was very broad. Compared, say, to a novel like Fingersmith, where, in advance of writing it, I literally knew what was going to happen in each of the chapters, in this novel I would start a scene and not know what my characters should be saying to each other. So I had to write the scene and figure out what was going on in it at the same time, which meant that I had to do a lot of rewriting. I have a huge pile of scenes that I wrote and rejected, or rewrote, or tried out different things in and abandoned. It was terribly unsettling. I know, with some writers, that’s just how they work, but for me it was not really enjoyable – although, again, satisfying to get there in the end. Lucie Armitt: The other thing that strikes me is the way in which you situate those plots within a sense of space and time, and I just wanted to explore that a bit with you. The last time I spoke to you I tried my best to claim you as a ‘Welsh’ writer, and you said that in all conscience you didn’t really feel you could say that, but what is very clear to me is that you are really a London writer – or, at least, your books speak ‘of’ London – and it is equally clear to me that there is something about London that particularly sparks your creativity. So, a broad question I wanted to ask is whether it is London, specifically, that sparks that creativity or whether it is simply ‘city life’ – or a cityscape. Then, building on that question, could you ever envisage writing a novel ‘beyond’ the city, as it were? Sarah Waters: Well, as to whether it’s just London or any city I don’t know, really, because I’ve only ever lived in London and only ever written from London. In some ways, I think using London so much is just lack of imagination as it’s there ready to use! But I do love London, and I love London precisely because I have come to it from a small town in Pembrokeshire – which was a great place to grow up in, but London seemed to me to be the place to go to perhaps slightly re-invent yourself, or to find communities of people – in my case, gay people – that you couldn’t find at home. One of the things I love about London is that it’s a city of immigrants – lots of cities are; this is why I think perhaps another city would give me the same pleasures and passions; but I like the scale of London, the fact that it’s full of stories and they’re all jostling up against one other, side by side. Everywhere is full of stories of course but, as I say, it is something about the fact that big cities offer people anonymity and this chance for them to reinvent themselves, or to find communities of interest that can be quite odd, or queer, or marginal – it’s all there, really. I also like the history of London – the depth of London’s history – and the fact that it’s still there on its streets. I find that very, very inspiring, the fact that you can walk down a London street and see bits of the 19th century, bits of the 18th century, bits of Medieval London – Roman London, if you want to. Lucie Armitt

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It’s there and it’s almost like it’s peopled with ghosts – again, jostling up against each other or passing through each other. I find that very exciting. Lucie Armitt: One of the features emerging from your work is an almost tactile sense of your characters becoming materially grounded in the streets they’re walking. And I have found myself, on occasions, when reading your books, actually reaching down the London A/Z and plotting out the routes various characters have taken. I’m interested by what it is about your writing that makes me do this – and I’m wondering if it’s something to do with the streets offering a form of continuity between a different period (which, I suppose, is alien to all of us) and a location which remains constant across periods and, therefore, to which we can relate now. Although, of course, somebody more familiar with London, or who lives in London, will already feel much more ‘at home’ in your books than somebody who lives outside. Sarah Waters: I think maybe it is something to do with that – that, because the novels are set in different periods, using sometimes very well known and sometimes less well known but always real London locations is a way of anchoring London in some sort of present. I think that’s probably true – I’ve never really thought about it quite like that before. I know London very well and I like walking around London and finding new bits to it, and I like reading about London’s history, so I suppose because I notice London and because I’m always geographically situating myself within the context of London, it’s hard for me to write about London characters who aren’t doing exactly that, too. So, often, my characters will respond to London just like I do: they’re very interested in where they are and who has been there before them and who is in the next street, or what’s around the next corner. So it’s partly just that – they’re as excited by London as I am. Lucie Armitt: And a very simple question: what is it about other historical periods that particularly intrigues you? Sarah Waters: I know, I get asked this all the time and so you’d think I’d have some brilliant answer, wouldn’t you? But I can only really answer it by referring to the shape that my writing career has taken, which is that it all grew from Tipping the Velvet, which itself grew from a PhD thesis that I was writing about lesbian and gay historical fiction, and I finished that wanting to write a lesbian historical novel of my own, with an urban setting – a London setting. I went to the 1890 s because it seemed like a great decade to set it in. It’s full of all sorts of promise – a very ripe decade. I didn’t have a sense, at that point, that I would be a historical novelist forever, but then Affinity grew out of that, and then Fingersmith grew out of Affinity. So history, and more importantly thinking about how we write about history – the pleasures of writing about history, all those things – that was my way into writing fiction and each book has grown out of interests that remain from the book before. 120

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People have pointed out that I am edging forward in The Night Watch, because it’s set in the 1940s, but I’d hate to think, ‘One day I’ll write a ‘‘proper’’ novel and that’ll have a contemporary setting.’ Novels always have to have settings and in a sense contemporary settings are as much fantasy settings as period settings are. In addition, because a big agenda for me is writing lesbian stories, I’m still very much aware that the past is absolutely teeming with untold gay stories, or stories that aren’t popularly known. For me, entering the past via telling queer stories is a great way of finding a slightly new way of talking about familiar periods like the Victorian era or wartime. Lucie Armitt: Would you identify yourself as a writer who is part of a lesbian literary tradition? Sarah Waters: Yeah I think so – again, partly because of the way I started writing. I was very conscious when I started writing that I’d just been spending this postgraduate time looking at other lesbian and gay writers, lots of whom had written about the past themselves. Lesbians and gay men have always been quite keen to invoke the past or to refer to the past as an apology for gay love – citing the Ancient Greeks, and Sappho, for example. There have been some great lesbian historical writers: Sylvia Townsend Warner, or Rene´e Vivien and Natalie Barney at the turn of the last century, or Mary Renault or Marguerite Yourcenar. There has been this consistent appeal to the past, or interest in the past in lesbian and gay writing. In that sense I was aware that I was doing something that had been done for a long time, but more specifically, I suppose, at the very tail end of my thesis I’d been looking at modern lesbian and gay historical fiction and I was really influenced by writers like Ellen Galford, Isabel Miller (who wrote Patience and Sarah), and Chris Hunt, who is a woman writer of fantastic gay men’s historical fiction. She wrote a novel called Street Lavender, which is a Victorian-set gay novel which is loads of fun, and, to be honest, Tipping the Velvet was a lesbian version of that. It’s quite clear to me that I couldn’t have written any of my books without having read those books first. Also Jeanette Winterson, of course; she’s always been interested in the past, and how we use the past. I do feel my work was born out of all of those different traditions. Lucie Armitt: Do you feel an especial affinity with Winterson, because it seems to me you are a very different sort of novelist? Sarah Waters: No I don’t, really. When I was first published a couple of reviewers were keen to put me in the same bracket, but I thought ‘it’s just we’re the only two lesbian writers they can think of’. I don’t think I’ve got much in common with Jeanette Winterson at all, and I’m sure she’d feel she hasn’t got much in common with me. She’s much more in a modernist tradition, which I don’t feel part of: I like her work, but we haven’t got similar agendas, it seems to me. Lucie Armitt: Staying with lesbian and queer culture, though more particularly in relation to The Night Watch, one of the questions that struck me about this novel Lucie Armitt

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is that although it is specifically about lesbian culture, you also seem to be setting lesbian culture at the hub of a broader cultural picture of the role played, during wartime, by the ‘illicit’, either with regard to personal relationships or social activities. I’m thinking of characters like Reggie and Duncan, for example, and your description of prison life. I’m intrigued as to whether you are consciously linking lesbian culture with other forms of social marginalization in this book? Sarah Waters: Well, actually, it only became clear to me how much the different worlds of the book are illicit after a while. I think it’s much more that, at the start, because I was writing about wartime, and it’s terribly familiar territory to us, I wanted to find fresh ways into it. Obviously I had my lesbian stories, that was one thing, but I wanted to broaden the novel out beyond my lesbian characters a bit: it felt a bit too claustrophobic otherwise. There was this character, Viv, a straight woman, and I was interested in having her in a relationship with a married man – which actually is a kind of cliche´ as a straight woman’s story. And then there is her brother Duncan, who is gay and has been in prison, and that was purely because I’d read an account of prisoners in a prison cell during an air raid – an autobiographical account – and I just thought ‘Wow!’ I just hadn’t really thought that, of course, people were in prison during the War. Then I began to realize that everybody in the book was engaged in illicit or clandestine activities. It was really interesting to me, then, to see how the different relationships and activities played off each other. So, you have characters like Helen and Julia, at the beginning of the novel, who are a lesbian couple who are closeted, of course, going into a park, having a picnic as two women friends. Then you’ve got Viv and her lover Reggie, who have to go into the country to have their picnic because he’s married. They’re instantly recognizable as a couple in a way that Helen and Julia aren’t, but there are different pressures on them to be secret. Everybody’s got to be secret for different reasons and I just liked that. Actually, I don’t think of them as marginal people at all; I just think of them as perfectly ordinary people from the 1940s, but they happen to have these things going on in their lives. Lucie Armitt: That concept of secrecy actually works very well in relation to darkness, which is quite a key theme in the book, partly of course because of the black out. But it seems to me that darkness plays a key role in other novels of yours and I’m interested to ask you a bit more about that. Is this purely coincidental, or is a longer-term theme developing? Sarah Waters: Well, I suppose Affinity is a novel where darkness plays a big role and that’s partly because of the nature of the institutions that I was writing about there: on the one hand spiritualism, which obviously made great play of ideas around light and darkness, both in terms of ‘seeing beyond the darkness of death’, this kind of other world – the next world, that was often called ‘The Summer Land’, as if there was this realm of light; and also in terms of what 122

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actually happened in se´ances, which were often conducted in darkness, obviously, and during which there’d be these terribly dramatic, theatrical entrances by spirits in gauzy outfits. So there was that on one side, and then there was the world of Millbank prison – a great Gothic, dark structure containing the dark cell, to which prisoners were sent as punishment. So I realized again, and again it was only something that happened to me as I was writing, that there were these overlapping themes in the two worlds that could be played off each other. Somebody like Selina, the spirit medium in the prison, is very adept at invoking the dramatic effect of darkness – telling Margaret she is going to come to her after dark, for example. I realized the novel was about the pleasures and dangers of darkness; the pleasures of it being when you are in control of it, and the dangers coming from when you are at its mercy! In The Night Watch I found myself utterly captivated by the idea of the blackedout city, as lots of people were at the time. People moaned, of course, about the black out. People got depressed and talked about the ‘Black out blues’. People killed themselves because they couldn’t stand the black out any longer! But at the same time you get somebody like Elizabeth Bowen writing amazing short stories about how the city is transformed by darkness and transformed by the moon. Just imagine a full moon in a blacked-out city! People talked about the new details you saw because of the black out, the silhouettes that you didn’t notice by day. I just got excited about that and, yes, did use the landscape in this way. It’s a city in which all sorts of clandestine things could go on in the shadows. People did seem to be having sex in the blackout all the time: gay sex, straight sex. It was a city newly born through darkness, really. So, who could resist that? It’s just great stuff to write about. Lucie Armitt: One of the scenes that really struck me when I was reading The Night Watch, precisely because I’d never even thought of it before, was the scene you referred to earlier, concerning the prisoners being kept in their cells during bombing raids. The Night Watch isn’t, of course, the first time you’ve talked about prison culture; as you say, in Affinity you do similarly, but the difference is that, in Affinity you are dealing with female inmates during the Victorian period and, in The Night Watch, you are talking about male inmates during the Second World War. In each case, several of the prisoners are incarcerated for reasons other than what we might think of as ‘criminal offences’. I just wondered how researching the two novels compared: were you struck by the experiences being similar, or actually radically different? Sarah Waters: The difference in period dramatically altered what was available to me for research purposes, because of course in the 19th century women prisoners were pretty voiceless – they haven’t left much of a record and the records that I did use and could use for Millbank Prison or generally for prison life, tended to be official records that were written by men – male governors, people like that, or Home Office records or their equivalent, or anecdotal studies (for example, Henry Lucie Armitt

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Mayhew and John Binny wrote an important study called The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life). So, they were women’s stories mediated through these kinds of male commentators and often I had to work hard to get working-class women’s stories from other sources, including my imagination, I suppose. I had to do more imagining about the paths that women might have taken to end up in prison. With the ’40s, however, it was easier, partly because I write about a conscientious objector and lots of conscientious objectors went through the prison system in the ’40s and were very literate and left very literate accounts. And there were also some accounts written by gay men who’d been in prison who, again, perhaps were journalists to start with, or writers to start with – Rupert Croft-Cooke, people like that. So, there was a lot more first-hand material written by men – and very observant stuff – as well as other sorts of prisoners who had been through the system. There was rather a vogue for prison autobiographies during the ’40s and ’50s, so there was a lot more for me to draw on. And, again, the prisons have different roles in each novel, because with Millbank, partly because it’s further away in time, I felt I had more of a licence to exploit its Gothic potential. It’s a Gothic novel, Affinity, and I used the prison in that way, a bit like I used the asylum in Fingersmith, whereas The Night Watch has a different ‘feel’; I was using the material in a more realist manner in that novel. Lucie Armitt: I just wanted to open up the subject a bit, to consider how your writing is being situated in relation to ‘the contemporary marketplace’, starting with adaptation for television. Your first novel, Tipping the Velvet, was immediately seized on and adapted. What was it about Tipping the Velvet that grabbed the attention of the production company and made them say ‘Yes, this will make good television?’ Sarah Waters: Well, it wasn’t ‘immediately’ seized on, actually. What happened was that the production company, Sally Head, got hold of it. Production companies are actively looking for books to adapt – that’s part of the nature of the TV and film industry. So, they came across Tipping the Velvet and they really liked it and felt it would work as good TV. Then they got Andrew Davies on board who, it seemed to me, saw the book as a chance to do the kind of thing he likes: telling stories about young women’s sexual awakening. More particularly, for him it was a chance to do something a bit different because of it being a lesbian novel. The production company then pitched it to the BBC and it actually took a couple of years for the BBC to mull it over and ‘green light’ it, as they call it. Lucie Armitt: It was very early in your career, though. Sarah Waters: Yeah, but I think the fact that I was an unknown writer was probably in their favour, because it made me cheap, apart from anything else! A bigger-name writer would probably have expected more money, so in that sense it 124

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was probably an actual benefit and, I think, without wanting to sound cynical about it, in the best possible way I think it suited everybody’s agenda: it gave Andrew the chance to do something a bit more daring than usual; it gave the BBC the chance to do a period drama, which they’re terribly good at, but – just in case people are getting a bit bored with the period drama format – it gave them the chance to make it a bit saucy, to ‘sex it up’ a bit. So, it suited everybody and I think that’s why it happened; it was just the right thing at the right time. Lucie Armitt: The other group that has almost ‘pounced’ on your writing is, of course, the academic market. I think there is a sense in which we consider you to be one of ‘our’ writers. And, on one level, as somebody who has come through the system yourself, having a doctorate yourself, having come through literary studies yourself, do you feel in any way that your literary ‘credentials’ have contributed to the academic interest that is already establishing itself in your work and which will clearly further develop over time? Sarah Waters: Well, maybe. As I say, Tipping the Velvet was a continuation of all the work that had gone into my thesis, really. So, in that sense I’ve always brought to the books I’ve written the sorts of issues I know literary departments are interested in talking about: class and gender, sexuality, and playing around with literary tradition. The books lend themselves well to being analysed, I suppose, because I write them with my old literary critical background somewhere still in my head. Lucie Armitt: So you are still conscious of that academic voice, then? Sarah Waters: Not as much as I was, I must admit; I can’t in any sense claim to have a foot in the academic camp now. My ‘take’ on academia is frozen when I left in 1995. As time has gone on, I have got more interested in stories and storytelling without my academic’s head on, but it’s still there in the broadest sense. Lucie Armitt: Because you also have a strong popular following, it’s fair to say – you have managed to bridge that divide. Again, is that something you consciously do, or is that just something you’re able to do? Sarah Waters: No, not consciously. If you try and second-guess an audience, or try and appeal to a range of audiences at once, it can be an absolute disaster. I just still write books that I feel passionate about wanting to write, pursuing issues and ideas that I want to pursue, and I think it’s the fact that the books are pretty accessible, and that they do tend to have quite a narrative pace to them, that makes them good for popular appeal. Lucie Armitt: On the level of a different sort of appeal, as somebody who has been extremely successful in being awarded prizes of a variety of kinds, I wanted to ask you what role you feel the literary prize has in relation to writing? Lucie Armitt

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Sarah Waters: It’s funny, isn’t it? I don’t know if you feel that prizes have become more of an industry these days than they used to be – I feel they have. Certainly, I’ve been on prize short lists and I’ve been on prize-judging panels and seen the other side of it, and I have to say, they are odd things. I used to think, when I was young, that something like the Booker Prize was just given to ‘the best book of that year’, but what I didn’t know and what I couldn’t know until I’d been on a judging panel, really, is that of course there are all sorts of other decisions that you make. Often, if you have a panel of five people everybody feels passionate about a different book, so you end up giving it to the book that everybody thinks is OK. Or, you want to give it to one book, but ‘Oh, he just happens to have won the Booker Prize so he doesn’t really need another prize, we’ll give it to someone else’. Or, ‘Here’s an up and coming writer from an independent press, let’s give it to him/her – it would be nice to do that’. There are all sorts of other factors coming into play, all of which are absolutely fine, in their own way, but they do make prizes a bit more complex than perhaps most people would realize. So, it’s great when you get them, but there’s a lot more to prizes than just what is the best book of the year. Who could possibly say one book is the best book of the year? Inevitably, it is going to be complicated. Can I just say that a more worrying thing, in my opinion, is the whole trend, in book selling and publishing at the moment, for ‘Best Sellers’ and I think the prizes are being used by bookshops (through promotions) and by publishers to narrow down the kinds of books that are being sold. Large numbers of books are still being sold; in fact, I think I’m right in saying that more books are being sold than ever, but it’s a small group of best sellers that is selling loads of copies. Again, it’s wonderful if you’re one of the best sellers, but it’s not so great if you’re an up and coming writer who’s a bit more original who just isn’t going to get a look in. I think it’s worrying if it becomes too closed a system. Lucie Armitt: Again, one of the things prizes feed into, though, is constructing a profile, almost, of the ‘celebrity writer’, or the writer as celebrity. And I know you’ve just come back from doing a global media tour connected with The Night Watch, and I wanted to ask you a little bit about that. I imagine, when you first started writing, that was the last thing on your mind, really. How does your emerging profile as a celebrity writer affect the way you approach your writing? Does the actual practice of writing seem to you to have anything to do with that at all, or are they unrelated things? Sarah Waters: The actual practice of writing is quite unrelated to that; they are completely opposite activities. Being at home, writing, is a very solitary thing – it’s just you and your computer for a long time, wrestling with a bit of text and, of course, what publishers increasingly want their authors to do is to perform or to give ‘sound-bites’. That’s the mind-crushing thing, really, that people want you to be able to sum up your book in a nice sentence for a radio interview or something – which is a bit depressing. That sort of thing doesn’t actually impinge 126

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interview with Sarah Waters

on my day to day writing routine, but what I hadn’t anticipated at the start was that I’d ever get a sense of my writing ‘career’ and my writer’s ‘profile’, and I think that’s a rather more fragile thing – and it is, frighteningly, something over which you have no control, really, as a writer. My day to day writing experience has been exactly the same since I started writing ten years ago, but it’s all the other stuff that has changed; that’s the stuff over which I don’t have any control and it’s about image and, as you say, about celebrity (however minor ‘celebrity’ is when you’re a writer). What is frightening is that I think writers can get to a point when they are well known enough to tip over into being something else – and that can put people off reading their books. I’ve had the experience myself, with writers, of thinking ‘I don’t want to read that, because I feel like I’ve read it already’. It seems tragic – absolutely awful – that the industry can produce that effect, but it does and it’s very hard to know how to negotiate that as a writer because, as I say, it’s beyond your control. Lucie Armitt: Finally, how much are you prepared to tell us about the next project? Sarah Waters: I would tell you lots, but there isn’t much to tell, really, because it’s the merest gleam in my eye at the moment. I actually finished The Night Watch at the end of June 2005, but then there was the process of copy editing, which went on for ages and then, in November 2005, I seemed to start the publicity process. That’s been ongoing ever since, so I haven’t really had a moment to write, or hardly even to plan the next book. But I do have an idea, which is probably to stay more or less in the same period, the post-war period, probably to edge into the early 50 s, just as a way of getting into a slightly new phase of British history and to look more at the repercussions of the War. I’m interested, for example, in the impact of the war on the class system in Britain and to think a bit more about that, about women – young women – and class. But that’s about as far as I’ve got.

author biography Lucie Armitt is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Salford. Her principal publications include: Fantasy Fiction (Continuum, 2005), Contemporary Women’s Writing and the Fantastic (Palgrave, 2000), A Readers’ Guide to George Eliot (Palgrave, 2000), Theorising the Fantastic (Arnold, 1996), and she is editor of Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction (Routledge, 1991). She is currently (with Sarah Gamble) writing a book on The New Women’s Writing. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400323

Lucie Armitt

feminist review 85 2007

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