Susanna Clarke spent ten spare-time years on a novel that fetched £1 million
While editing cookbooks in Cambridge, Susanna Clarke wrote a vast novel about English magicians in stolen early-morning hours, never sure it would be finished or published. A decade later, Bloomsbury offered a £1 million advance and printed 250,000 hardcovers across three countries before the book's release.
Clarke was born in Nottingham on 1 November 1959, the eldest daughter of a Methodist minister whose postings moved the family around Northern England and Scotland. She read Conan Doyle, Dickens and Austen, took a degree in philosophy, politics and economics at St Hilda's College, Oxford, in 1981, and spent eight years in publishing before teaching English in Turin and Bilbao. In Spain she had a waking dream of a man in 18th-century dress, somewhere like Venice, whose dabbling in magic had gone badly wrong.
Back in England, she signed up for a five-day fantasy workshop run by Colin Greenland and Geoff Ryman. With only bundles of notes, she carved out a short story about three women secretly practising magic. Greenland quietly sent part of it to Neil Gaiman, who likened reading it to watching a first-time pianist play flawlessly. Clarke and Greenland later fell in love and moved in together.
The novel crept forward in fragments. She aimed for three hours of writing a day from 5:30 in the morning, stitched pieces together rather than working from start to finish, and later admitted she would never have begun had she known it would take ten years. By around 2001 she was despairing. Agent Giles Gordon sold the unfinished manuscript in early 2003 after two publishers called it unmarketable. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, set during the Napoleonic Wars and written as a pastiche of 19th-century prose, came out in September 2004, won a Hugo Award, and became a best-seller and later a seven-part BBC series.
A 2006 story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, gave its women the magical power the novel had deliberately kept domestic for historical authenticity. A planned sequel stalled when chronic fatigue syndrome made the sprawling project too demanding, so Clarke turned to an older, smaller idea. Piranesi, about a man living in a mysterious House, appeared in 2020 and won the Women's Prize for Fiction the following year.
Source: Susanna Clarke
