Francesca Simon's Reading List

"The plot of The American Senator is about one of my favourite Trollope characters, Arabella Trefoil. Apparently, Edith Wharton based The House of Mirth ’s Lily Bart on her. Arabella Trefoil is the impecunious niece of a duke and has been on the marriage market for 12 years. She’s been struggling to find someone appropriate. She’s tied to her mother who she hates. They’re always going to stay with people and way outstaying their welcome because they have no money. It’s just dreadful. Then, at the end, when she does marry, she says, “She need never again seem to be gay in order that men might be attracted.” That made me think of that line in When Harry Met Sally when Marie—Carrie Fisher—says, “Tell me I’ll never have to be out there again.” It’s the exact same thing. Of course, contemporary resonances are not all the same. Women had more limited options, but Trollope has got incredible empathy with this woman who is clever but has to make the social rounds to try to get some guy to marry her because he’s got money and her value is dropping in the marriage market. Trollope is also very interesting on the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the industrial class. Should the poor daughter of an aristocrat marry someone who’s coming up from the working class? They’re complex heroines. I’ve seen Arabella Trefoil compared to Becky Sharp. But, in a way, Arabella’s position is a lot more precarious. Who is Trollope like? Probably he is like Thackeray, because he does have a great sense of humour. He’s really, really funny. He is wicked. He’s bitchy, that’s what Trollope is. All of his characters—or a lot of them—are always trying to get one up on each other but pretending to be polite. That was the other thing I found hard to understand about British people, as an American. They would say things like, ‘We must get together again sometime’, which is British for ‘I hope I never see you again’, but the first time someone said that to me, I pulled my diary out. It was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I just do wrong?’ Trying to understand what people are actually saying, that back and forth, Trollope helps with that. “Trollope wrote to a stopwatch and compared being a writer to being a cobbler” But one of the things that’s really great about Trollope as a writer is that he’s unexpected in his characters. So, most of the plot of The American Senator is about Arabella Trefoil deciding that she is going to try to snare Lord Rufford by pretending that he has proposed to her—because he kisses her in a carriage. Lord Rufford is only interested in smoking cigars and hunting and tries to extricate himself from this very difficult position because he doesn’t want to humiliate her but, on the other hand, he doesn’t want to marry her. But Trollope has these marvellous paragraphs where Lord Rufford goes, ‘Maybe I should marry her. She wouldn’t get in my way. I could go hunting. I could smoke my cigars.’ And, at the end, he marries someone who very firmly stops him from smoking his cigars, stops him hunting. He gets fat and is a little sorry that he didn’t marry Arabella, who would have just left him alone. I think that’s absolute genius. Trollope captures that, ‘How dare you do this to me? There’s no way I’m going to marry you! You’ve been on the market forever’ to ‘Maybe should I? Shouldn’t I? Maybe it would be a good thing to do. I’m going to have to get married. Would it be so terrible to be married to someone who would leave me alone?’ It’s cynical, but it’s funny. All his books have those unexpected moments, where a character does something that you don’t expect, and that’s my moment in The American Senator . Absolutely and—unlike Jane Austen writing about two men alone—he writes about women alone all the time. He has no problem with that. Trollope himself had the experience of someone trying to trap him into marriage. A landlady pushed her daughter in his way, hoping that she could burst in and compromise him and say, ‘Right, you’re engaged.’ Lord Rufford talks about himself as being hunted. He says, “one sometimes feels oneself like a carcass in the midst of vultures.” He kind of is. The other thing I really like about Trollope, as an American, is that these people have such a horror of commerce. And, yet, all they do is engage in commerce—except the goods they’re selling are their children. But yes, Trollope does get inside what people are saying and thinking privately. It’s like a soap opera—in the best possible way—because the characters are incredible and their situations give huge importance to smaller things. In some ways, I always think of Trollope as a very feminine writer, he’s very involved with the domestic. I should say that the top plot of The American Senator is really dreary. It’s about an American senator coming over and getting involved in some legal case, to do with hunting. I can never remember what that plot is, because it’s just so inconsequential. There’s often two or even three plots going on in Trollope—it’s like an episode of Seinfeld . Trollope does do that. His American characters are always spirits of misrule, really. They turn up at inopportune moments and recall engagements that shouldn’t have happened. They’re normally financiers. But it’s the subplot, the Arabella Trefoil plot, that’s just fantastic. She turns down a lot of people, in the assumption that there’s always someone better. The truth is, there isn’t always someone better. That’s another lesson of the book. It’s not a guarantee that if you turn down five proposals, the sixth one will be better than the previous five and, in her case, they start getting worse. The prey, the field, gets smaller. As I said, Arabella Trefoil is probably my favourite Trollope heroine. It’s Trollope’s empathy with her, even though she’s supposed to be a fortune-hunter and an adventuress."

"This is the one I’ve read the most. I can show it to you, because I have all my Trollope Society editions here. It is pretty big, but his books are very easy to read. The books I’ve chosen are the ones that you can read on their own. They’re my favourites of the standalones. The Way We Live Now is about a swindler or confidence trickster, Augustus Melmotte, who bears a strong resemblance to Robert Maxwell, if you remember him. It’s about an outsider who tries to make his way in British society and it’s all a house of cards. He’s trying to ramp up shares, he doesn’t have to put any money in and other people will take the hit, it’s about class and money and corruption. Even though this trickster financier is dubious socially, he has a daughter, Marie, who is a massive heiress. And there’s somebody named Lord Nidderdale who is so dissolute that no one of his own class will have him. So, a marriage is arranged between Marie Melmotte and Lord Nidderdale which, of course, falls apart when her father loses most of his money. And there’s this wonderful scene with Lord Nidderdale and his father—who can’t stand each other—about what he’s going to do now. And the father says to Lord Nidderdale, ‘How do you mean to live if you don’t marry her?’ He’s broke and he’s got to find someone rich and they have this incredible discussion about what’s available to him. There’s the Widow X. She’s got 8,000 a year. She’s 40, but… At the end Lord Nidderdale says, “It’s a pity there shouldn’t be a regular statement published with the amount of money, and what is expected in return. It’d save a deal of trouble.” That’s what I mean: it’s laid out there. But again, I said how great Trollope is at the unexpected. When everything is falling apart, Marie Melmotte goes to see Lord Nidderdale and says, ‘I have no friends and I need some advice’ and they talk. They are these two children essentially—even though he’s probably 40—whose parents are moving them around like chess pieces. There’s this really nice scene—of kindness, really—as they try to work out what she should do. What should he do? Given that he’s such a miscreant, Lord Nidderdale has those moments. Trollope’s characters, even if they seem outrageous and two-dimensional, there’s always that extra thing that you’re not expecting. I feel emotional about the narrator. The huge emotion for me was when I finished The Last Chronicle of Barset . That was the end of six months’ of reading because I read all six Pallisers first. I was thinking, ‘Oh my God! I’m coming to the end of six months of reading 12 massive novels.’ And then, in the last paragraph, Anthony says, “And now, if the reader will allow me to seize him affectionately by the arm, we will together take our last farewell of Barset and of the towers of Barchester.” I just burst into tears because I felt like someone was talking to me from the grave. I was feeling so wistful and then this sentence just jumped at me, like he was by my side. It’s hard to explain, but it was very powerful. But in terms of his characters, I think you do get emotionally involved. The former prime minister John Major has this thing for Lily Dale, who is one of Trollope’s most annoying heroines. Her fiancé dumps her and she decides she’s going to spend the rest of her life pining for him. I’m giving the keynote speech to the Trollope Society this year and I’m so annoyed that it won’t be in person, because I have been longing to grab John Major and say, ‘Why, why? Lily Dale! You’ve got to be kidding!’ So, yes, you do get emotionally involved with them, because they feel like real people. Though I’ve never burst into tears except that once. I was totally living in that world. Trollope does talk to you all the time, which I like. Maybe some people don’t like it, but he’s got a wonderful narrative voice. It’s very friendly and it’s very compact. He’s like a companion. I was feeling that I was going to miss hanging out with him. That’s what it was. I felt I was leaving him. You don’t at all. He’s extremely readable. I could go so far as to say that he’s an easy read. He’s got this easy flowing style and you get caught up in it very quickly. My father (the writer Mayo Simon) summed up Henry James’s novels to me as ‘Who gets the money? Who gets the girl?’ which is the plot of many Trollope novels too. Or, rather, who gets to keep the money? Who wants the money? Who doesn’t have the money? And who gets the girl?"

"The Barchester novels are his tales of clerical and ecclesiastical life and the Pallisers are the political novels and are all about power. The Eustace Diamonds is part of the Palliser sequence, but I read the Pallisers out of sequence and it was not a problem. The Eustace Diamonds, in particular, is a great one to start off with, because, again, it’s one of those wonderful heroines, Lizzie Eustace. She is a wealthy widow and she wants to keep this valuable family necklace—the Eustace Diamonds—and insists that her husband gave it to her. The family are furious. They want it back because it’s an heirloom. There are also all these men who want to marry her because she’s gorgeous and sexy and rich, but she’s interested in her cousin, who is engaged to marry a mousy governess. Again, this cousin is trying to calculate, if he marries the mousy governess—who he does love—he’ll be stuck in a small house somewhere near the Swiss Cottage (Trollope is always very precise about London). This governess has got all the virtues, but does he want to be living in a small house near the Swiss Cottage (the equivalent of Siberia back then)? “The other thing it’s important to remember about Trollope is his absolute fixation on money” So in this book the heroine is a wealthy widow trying to hold on to the wealth that she has. She’s on her own, which does give her a lot of autonomy as she tries to make her way in the world. She is a schemer, because her husband didn’t give her the diamonds, but she persuades herself that he did. The other reason this is a really good book is that I can never remember how it ends. Even though I have read it many times, it’s always a good one to reread because I can’t remember what happens. I have a feeling that Frank does go and marry Lucy Morris, the virtuous governess, but he’s probably sad that he’s ended up in a house near the Swiss Cottage when he could have been in Mayfair where he belonged. His heroine does usually get married, but it’s often slightly bittersweet. Arabella Trefoil does get married, but to a really pompous diplomat. She won’t be very happy, but it’ll be better than the life that she’s been living. It’s not like she marries her one true love. Sometimes the more minor characters, like little Lucy, the governess, do. There’s normally an impediment like someone is illegitimate or somebody doesn’t have any money, but their virtue shines through. But where Trollope is really strong is with his adventuresses, his Arabella Trefoils and his Lizzie Eustaces. It’s kind of fun because they’re so scheming. They’re shameless. They just go for it and sometimes it’s heart-stopping: ‘Oh my God! She’s really going to do it. She is actually going to wear those diamonds at this event.’ How do you behave shamelessly and yet keep your reputation? It’s those important kinds of question."

"Miss Mackenzie is an old maid of 35. Poor Miss Mackenzie! She’s spent her previous years looking after ailing relatives—her father and her brother—and she gets left all this money. And she decides, ‘I want to live!’ So she goes to Bath with the intention of living and she eventually has three suitors. Trollope describes her as a thin and straggling old maid, but she’s grown into her looks a bit. Again, it’s about what she can hope for now, because she’s got money. Who’s an appropriate match? It’s just fun to see this woman, who’s been living this drab, dreadful existence, getting left all the money. The rest of the family are furious that she’s got the money and they don’t, and she decides she’s going to have a good time, which she does. No, not at all. She’s someone who has pretty much never been outside of her front door. She’s always been the dependent, the poor relation. The poor relation suddenly gets all the money and decides to go to Bath. She doesn’t really know what to do. She falls in with schemers, a number of people who—let’s just say—wish to relieve her of the burden of her wealth. It is funny that she’s this poor old maid who at age 35 is absolutely beyond it. As a woman, it does make you very aware of the changes, hopefully, in our lives. No. I do think The Eustace Diamonds is a good one to start with. Barchester Towers as well, because it introduces you to a lot of his most famous characters."

"It starts with the big question: the bishop has died, who’s going to get the job? And Archdeacon Grantly—who appears in many of the novels—is affronted to find out that they’ve brought in Bishop Proudie. He has an amazing wife, Mrs. Proudie, who tries to take over everything. It’s got one of my favourite sleazy characters, the Reverend Obadiah Slope (played by Alan Rickman when it was broadcast). Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Barchester Towers has also got one of my favourite, favourite scenes in Trollope, which is when Miss Thorne gives a party. There are two marquees, one for the tenants of the estate, the farmers and below, and one for the gentry. But what about the people who don’t fit so neatly into those categories? Trollope is very interested in them. There’s a woman called Mrs. Lookaloft who, because her daughters have learned the pianoforte and she has named her farmhouse Rosebank, muscles into the gentry’s tent. And it causes consternation. The scene is so funny. The tenants, the people below the ha-ha (which is a big ditch, that’s one word I learned from Trollope) are furious because she’s no better than them and they’ve all been mocking her about her daughters learning the pianoforte and her pretension in renaming her house. But then, suddenly, she’s with the gentry. She’s pushed her way in. And the gentry are appalled that this woman is invading their space. No one knows what to do about this breach. They’re wonderful characters and they are genuine slices of life. They really are classy soap operas. You get sucked in so quickly and easily. I was looking through them again yesterday, in preparation for talking to you. I thought, ‘I’ll just remind myself quickly of Lord whatever-his-name-is’—because it can be hard to remember—and I just found myself reading them again. They are really fun. Once you read one, it’s hard not to read all of them. Well, maybe not all. There are 47 and I’ve probably read about 35. Trollope wrote to a stopwatch and compared being a writer to being a cobbler. A lot of people made fun of him for that, and I just thought, ‘You are my hero! It’s a job and how great that you’re totally unpretentious about it.’ I admire Trollope’s interest in money and I also admire the way that he wrote 250 words every 15 minutes. He famously finished one novel and started the next one immediately. He’s so un-precious about himself, which is something I’ve really taken from him as a writer. For most of his life Trollope worked fulltime at the Post Office. For a long time, he didn’t make money from his books. He would get up early to write, and then go and do his job. He wrote on trains, he wrote when he was travelling. He just fitted it into his life. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh I need to be alone. I need my separate space. ‘Servants! Look after me because the Muse has descended from Olympus!’ He was just very practical. I think what he’s writing is a comedy of manners. But he’s also writing about the way the world is. He’s very alert to the changes in society, the Industrial Revolution and the declining power of the landed aristocracy, of which he was the poor cousin. He had to work. He’s the perfect person to be narrating these scenes. It is a real tapestry of Britain in the 19th century, but with a lot of things to say about our times as well. You learn a lot about life, really, and our lives, through reading someone like Trollope."

"House of Names is a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra, Iphigenia and Agamemnon. For those who don’t know, Agamemnon sacrifices his eldest daughter, Iphigenia, in order for the gods to provide winds to get the fleet going. But Colm Tóibín’s book is about the people on the sidelines. Iphigenia doesn’t tell her story, and Agamemnon isn’t telling his story; it’s Clytemnestra, and it’s Iphigenia’s siblings Orestes and Electra. It is almost unbearable to read, especially the beginning, because despite what I just said about knowing what’s going to happen, you really hope that it’s not going to happen. Clytemnestra is trying desperately to save her child. She and Iphigenia have been tricked into coming to the Greek camp, where Iphigenia thinks she’s going to marry Achilles, and instead discovers she’s going to be sacrificed. And it’s a way of looking at the ramifications – at what happens afterwards. Agamemnon just acts like nothing has happened, really. And Clytemnestra has ten years to plot her revenge, which she does in gruesome form. There are also the political ramifications – they’re supposed to be ruling this kingdom, and the royal family is busy murdering each other. Tóibín looks at all those other people who’ve been affected by this choice. So retellings, then, are a way of seeing the story through fresh eyes. You know the story, but maybe you haven’t considered: what was it like for Orestes? What was it like for Electra? Clytemnestra is often portrayed as just this blood-thirsty woman who kills her husband, kills Cassandra, takes a lover… But then, when you know the full horror of what she was exposed to with her daughter being sacrificed, it’s amazing she lasted so long before killing Agamemnon! So it’s a very powerful retelling, and it makes you think about the story from other people’s points of view. As writers and also as readers, we tend to get caught up in the point of view of whoever’s telling the story. Part of you can think, “Well, what choice did Agamemnon have? He was the leader of the Greeks. They’re getting restless. They need to set sail. The gods have insisted. Who is he to disagree? You have to obey the gods”. You can go along with it. But telling the story from the viewpoint of the rest of the family really stops you short. He is very much staying within the Greek world; he’s not trying for a modern response. But the family is horrified – no one in the family shrugs and says, “Oh well, what can you do? That’s how it is.” Their response is very human , exactly as you might expect. And Clytemnestra no longer believes in the gods anyway, so for her, the futility of it… That’s a very interesting point that Tóibín makes, that unless you believe, all of this is pointless. So I don’t think there is an attempt to put a modern sensibility here – although there is in one of the other books I’ve chosen…"

"Even though Miller’s prose doesn’t say, “Hey, let’s get with the program” – I mean, she doesn’t use modern language – she does inject a bit of modern sensibility. But I’ll get to that… It’s called The Song of Achilles. It’s not called the wrath of Achilles, which is how Homer starts his story. So the ‘Song’ of Achilles immediately softens him, because what we know of Achilles from Homer is that he’s this big warrior, and he has a foul temper, and he’s incredibly selfish, and he’s very happy to sulk. He’s very childish; he sulks in his tent while people are being massacred because Agamemnon has stolen one of his concubines, Briseis. But it’s back to what I said before, about seeing the story from a different point of view… It’s narrated by Patroclus, Achilles’s great friend and lover. So it’s understandable that Patroclus, as the narrator, would write the Song of Achilles. We know how the story ends. Patroclus doesn’t. They know that Achilles has chosen to have a short, glorious life versus a long, dull life – which at eight years old, when I first read these myths, I always thought was a terrible choice. Who would choose just to be famous after their death? I thought that was very foolish. So again, this story gives a different angle on the hero. The question that Miller is trying to answer, I think, is: why does Achilles go back into the fight, after his sulk? Why does he just forget all about his tantrum? And it’s because Hector kills Patroclus. So obviously their relationship had to be something of supreme importance for him to just cast aside the sulking and the tantrum. And then the true wrath of Achilles comes out. So it’s very much a love story, and has an almost domestic focus, even though she writes battle scenes. A modern bit she interjects is that Patroclus and Achilles set up a little tent for the women, to try to save the women from being raped, which I’m not sure they would have really been too bothered about then. But fair enough. She’s not doing a translation of the story. She is a modern writer, she’s a woman, and she is putting her own spin on it – and if Patroclus is a gentle, wounded, exiled person, why wouldn’t he be concerned about the women? It’s not unreasonable. It’s unlikely, but it’s not unreasonable, and she is looking at this war from a modern point of view, and the consequences for women. Just as Achilles-the-lover is brought to the foreground, so the consequences of war for women are also brought to the foreground in this telling. People who are just mentioned, who are just names, can step forward in retellings. It’s a bit like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. You get a chance to see and hear the story from a different point of view, and it does change your perspective. It widens, it deepens."

"I did Old and Middle English at Oxford, and I did Medieval Studies at Yale. Grendel was published in 1971, and I was absolutely astonished by the idea that you could take a poem like Beowulf and tell it from a different point of view. I know Wide Sargasso Sea came out in 1966, too… but now it’s a commonplace. “Let’s tell Hamlet from Ophelia’s point of view” – people are doing it all the time. But Grendel was an incredibly original idea, to tell the story from the point of view of the monster, not from the point of view of the hero. It was astoundingly original, and I think it really did tip off a lot of writers, just giving them that idea – like James , the retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the slave Jim, which is a brilliant novel by Percival Everett. And they become their own works of art, with a different starting point. Grendel, the monster, is a remarkable creation. He’s lonely, and his bloodthirsty nature causes him so much misery and sadness. But he’s also quite casual about eating people. He’s tormented by the mead hall and the light, and he’s always skulking around, peering in through cracks in the wood. As a portrait of loneliness and sadness, it’s just an astonishing creation. He’s still as monstrous as you might expect, but it was just focusing on what it would be like to be that monster whose raison d’etre is going into mead halls and eating people. He likes to talk about philosophy, and he’s moved – terribly moved – by song and music. Like I said, it doesn’t stop him! But the monster as a lonely creature just stuck with his horrible mother is quite a portrait. And the language that he uses… John Gardner was a medievalist. One of the phrases I really liked was that Grendel says, “Morning nails my eyes.” The way he sees the world – it’s so grim, so dark, there is just no light for this monster. I felt sorry for him. His own nature traps him. No, actually, surprisingly. She’s just kind of skulking. She can’t speak, so she’s just lumbering around the cave. I was surprised… I kept expecting the mother to appear because she has a much bigger role in the poem. It’s not sympathizing. It’s more understanding, I suppose. The idea of the mead hall was that there was this little flicker of light and warmth in a world of tremendous darkness – which Grendel is part of, of course. So you have this little tiny bit of shelter and comradeship, and he’s completely excluded from it. It’s very powerful, very unexpected, this portrait of loneliness. But he has no pity, he’s so filled with rage. So it’s about understanding the rage of a monster, and what he’s trying to feed – because however many people he kills and eats, it doesn’t assuage his sorrow or his loneliness. Salka , the Lady of the Lake, is based on the legend of the lady of Llyn y Fan Fach – which is the beautiful lake that they use in every film about Wales. The basic story is the story, essentially, of the Little Mermaid , or the opera Rusalka . It’s a water sprite or fairy who marries a shepherd on condition that he never strikes her three blows. But the blows are not physical blows. In some of the versions, he taps her on the shoulder and says, “What are you doing?”… In no version is it about domestic violence. It’s about him upbraiding her for, basically, being a fairy, because she behaves oddly. I picture her as neurodivergent. She laughs at a funeral, or she’ll cry at a wedding, because she can see into the future, and she is very blunt. Three times he tells her to stop, and she says, “You’ve shamed me for my fairy ways” – and she has to return to the lake forever after the third blow. She takes everything; fairies always bring great wealth, and she removes it. In any collection of Welsh fairy tales, this story appears. It varies – sometimes the challenge is, “You mustn’t ever strike me with iron” – but there’s always an accidental element. For example, in one of the versions, they’re saddling a horse, and he throws the bridle to her, and the bridle touches her arm – and that’s it, he’s touched her with iron, goodbye. Those versions didn’t do much for me. In some, she leaves; in some, he kills himself, he drowns; in some, the children stay, in some they go. I chose the saddest really, where she brings everything and she takes everything. I think there’s also an element of wish fulfillment. He’s a shepherd, and this Goddess has decided that she’s going to marry him. But fairy tales always have a bite in them. She says, “If you strike me three blows, I must leave” – and he says, “I love you. I would never hurt you. I would never hit you.” He sees it as, if you hit me three times – and that’s not what she’s talking about! As always with these things, he doesn’t actually understand what she is saying – which is a theme through a lot of fairy stories. My retelling started life as a cantata, a piece for two voices and orchestra, which I wrote with Gavin Higgins, who I’ve also written an opera with. This was premiered at the Three Choirs Festival and at Aldeburgh, the music festival. Because it started as two voices, that gave me the idea for doing it from different viewpoints, but it happened very organically. I didn’t intend it to be more than one or two voices. I didn’t know how I was going to write it – I thought, maybe it should be third person, or maybe she should tell the story. And what happened, literally, is that his mother got a word in. And so I thought, “Oh, alright, she can say something”. And then the dog decided he wanted to say something. It really did happen like that. And after four voices, I thought, “I’m going to let everybody talk.” The idea of the book, essentially, is the impact that this intense relationship has on this little village: on the girl that he didn’t marry, on his best friend… It makes his friends all question their rather tepid relationships, because they can see this is a very, very hot relationship that he and Salka have. And, of course, Owain and his mother have to hide the fact that Salka’s a fairy. This is not a good thing to be. Fairy is a huge insult. I read a lot of folklore reports, and there are several reports of fights breaking out at fairs when someone accuses someone else of having fairy blood. So we might think it’s charming, but it was very much an insult to suggest that you might be descended from fairies. I find the viewpoints very potent. I’d never told a story from two different points of view, so as a starting point that was a very interesting way of telling the story. But also, I realized pretty early on that if you’re talking about two people who are madly in love, and know they have this thing hanging over them, it’s kind of boring, because it’s very repetitive. Oh, he’s done it one time. Oh my God, the second time… So broadening it out really helped the story along. Her children come in, and they’re having a hard time because people don’t want to play with them because they sense her otherness. That’s a really important theme: how does a society deal with people who are different? Which is quite a modern idea, too. The village just came to life. I was thinking, “Who’s the girl he didn’t marry?”, right? That was obvious. And then the next door neighbour, and the disappointment of not being able to join the farms… the ripples, really, of marrying someone who comes from away. That’s all they say about her, ‘she comes from away’ – because most people never left their village. It’s set when things didn’t change that much, and a lot of people never left – they maybe went to a market, but that’s it. So saying you came from across the water – what does that even mean? Oh, lots of sources. One was an old book of Celtic folklore… The Professor of Welsh at Jesus College Oxford, which incidentally was my college, went round in the 19th century, collecting stories. And it was things like, “I spoke to the blacksmith, and he referred me to the old woman who lives over there, and she told me that her grandmother had told her…” A book which I really enjoyed was Carolyne Larrington’s The Land of the Green Man , which is a journey through the supernatural landscapes of the British Isles. Carolyne just retired, but she was Professor of Medieval History and Old Norse at Oxford, and also very interested in Game of Thrones . Carolyne loves this myth, and I’ve got to know her. One of her areas of study is how myth is used in a modern way. The opera I mentioned writing with Gavin was about Hel, the Norse goddess of the dead, as an angry funny teenager. So the work I do is very much related to Carolyne’s academic work. Yes. The Monstrous Child tells the story of Hel, an angry, lovelorn and funny teenager who happens to be the Norse goddess of the dead. Hel is half-human, half-corpse, daughter of a god and a giantess, who Odin hurls into the underworld and forces to rule the dead. Hel’s story seemed a great way to write about dysfunctional families and the turbulence, passion, and restlessness of adolescence, as well as a way of exploring body image and why so many young girls and women are convinced their bodies are hideous. In the myth, Hel spends eternity lying silent on a putrid bed. I thought this was a striking image of depression – a trapped teenage girl who has painted the walls of her bedroom black and won’t step outside. Why? What happened to her? I wanted to tell Hel’s story. I also wrote a book called Helping Hercules , which was about a girl who finds a magic coin that takes her back to the time of the Greek gods, and she goes along with Hercules. She’s not just helping Hercules – we see things like the judgment of Paris, where she intervened. She offers bubble gum, because there’s no sugar in Greece. Basically she throws all the stories off-kilter, coming up with a lot of the answers and having fun with the Greek heroes. But Salka is really a big one for me. The original cantata was called The Faerie Bride."

"You know, there are some books that you read last month and you can barely remember what they were about, but I remember very specifically reading The Once and Future King. I was eleven years old, and we were doing English in primary school in America. I was in the top group, and we were allowed to read a book, any book we wanted, as long as there were five words in the first ten pages that we didn’t know, and then we had to look them up. And I remember so vividly reading this book. I remember the beginning of The Once and Future King , which had the word ‘astrolabe’ in the first two sentences. It goes: ‘On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology’… No! They wouldn’t allow me to. And in the next sentence, ‘the governess was always getting muddled with her astrolabe’. So already I’ve got three words that I had never heard. What’s an astrolabe ? I looked them up… summulae logicales is a logical treatise. So I was just like, whoa… What is this lesson? I remember so much about this book. I remember sentences from it – let alone the characters. And I was just thinking this morning, it’s probably why I ended up doing Medieval Studies at Yale. The book had the most tremendous impact on me. It’s four books collected under the title The Once and Future King , which is a beautiful title, and it’s because Arthur becomes part of the sleeping army myth. I’ve actually written a book called The Sleeping Army ; across most cultures, there’s the idea that the king and his knights are asleep under a mountain – under the Tower of London, or the Terracotta Army in China… It’s a very general worldwide myth, and Arthur is now part of that. So he’s the future king, because one day he will wake up and save the kingdom. The book is set in medieval England. But what really got me, I think, was the funny, casual, easy way T.H. White tells this story. He’s taking a story that I knew, but treating it in a totally different way. I could not wait for my time to read this book during the school day. I also took it home because it was just overwhelmingly interesting. Now, the first one is The Sword and the Stone which is more aimed at children, I think, and the other three most definitely are not. It was eye-opening, the affair of Lancelot and Guinevere, who he calls Jenny. I love that. He has a jaunty, funny style. He also talks a lot about chivalry. What does it mean to be chivalrous? Of course, he’s living during the World Wars. Arthur wants to be a good king – what’s stopping him? It’s about warfare. How do you put things right? How do you correct things? It’s about being brought down by your own flaws – and also by curses and myths and magic – but you have these very real people. I was also fascinated by the third book, which I think is probably my favourite, called The Ill-Made Knight . It’s about Lancelot being hideously ugly, which is not how you think of him. And the line I remembered was right at the end, “The miracle was that he had been allowed to do a miracle.” And that’s the whole story of the ill-made knight. I learned about chivalry and the whole pageantry of it, but all in a jaunty style, and these people seemed very real to me – not stiff – they were very, very human. It’s a fantastic book. I’m sure it’s why I did medieval studies. It’s only because of this interview that I thought about it, but I’m sure this is what kicked it off. I love all that – I love the Provencal singers, I love the idea that there was something called courtly love. …And of course knights were bloodthirsty. They were like hoodlums. But this idea that somehow they were bound by this code of chivalry, and then the way that Christianity got its tentacles in there and tried to make the quests about something else, about purity… What does it mean to be pure? And to what extent can you resist your fate? All these ideas are in there, but it’s an incredibly fun and interesting read. I’m amazed how much I remembered from reading it when I was eleven."

"Yes. Now, I thought this book was absolutely outstanding, and it’s very different from the others. She is taking the Baba Yaga stories, the witch or the old lady who has a house with chicken legs that runs around. Is she evil? Is she good? And so far as I’m aware, Sophie Anderson has used that as the basis for a totally original story. This could be my ignorance, but I think she’s taken the character and done something very original with it. It’s different from the other retellings. This is about a girl who is betwixt and between. Marinka lives with her grandmother, Baba Yaga, whose job is to usher the dead back to the stars. So the dead come every night to the house with chicken legs, and the grandmother welcomes them and cooks for them, and then guides them through the doorway so that they will once again be part of the stars. I found the book very, very moving, because as part of the ritual of death, Baba Yaga asks them, “What are you taking to the stars? What has been meaningful to you in your life?” – which is quite a profound and big question. What did you gain from your life here? She’s trying to make a celebration of something that was meaningful in your life on Earth, before you become part of the universe. I don’t want to do any spoilers, but there is a very big twist about Marinka, the little girl who hates being just with the dead – as any child would. She longs to have friends, longs to go to school, doesn’t like living in a house that is always running away and going different places. So it’s really looking at what it’s like to live in a world in the space between life and death. It’s a book set in a liminal place, in that passage. And it’s also looking at the question, what does it mean to be a witch? What is an old lady, what is a witch? She guides them through the gate… Now, I have never read a Baba Yaga myth that’s about Baba Yaga guiding spirits through the gate. I think that’s probably completely original. The book was so outstandingly good: a really wonderful story, really wonderfully told. It’s profound, and a very special way of taking a character from a fairy tale and then spinning a story around the character, so you keep almost just the skeleton of the story – the house with chicken legs – though in her telling, the house is very benign. There’s a symbiotic relationship between Baba Yaga and the house. I thought Sophie Anderson did a really brilliant job. This is more inspired by, as opposed to retelling from a different point of view, but she is looking at Baba Yaga as a much more benign figure than the version often portrayed in Russian fairy tales. These stories wouldn’t last if they didn’t have big resonance. You could say that the House of Names is about the world’s most dysfunctional family, and about the world’s worst dad killing his daughter, and the violence within families. That, unfortunately, is true. But also we can’t escape our own time and our own sensibility. What strikes you and me about the story, what interests me as a writer, won’t be what will interest someone in a hundred years’ time. They will have a completely different interpretation, but I know that it will still speak to them, just as it speaks to us now. The word I often use is bass. There are bass notes here: they are about things that really matter, like, what is important to you in your life? How do you strive to be good? How do you cope with not being good? How do you cope with human weakness? How do you cope with loneliness? How do you cope with feeling outcast? These are universal themes, and they’ve been cast in these stories of heroes and monsters and gods, and woven with magic and power, but the basic fundamental themes are there."