22 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, she told
me, she latched on to the idea of a story
about two people living in a gigantic
house “with tides flowing through it.”
One character would explore the struc
ture and supply information about it to
the other. Over the years, the idea re
turned to her now and again, but she
never really got anywhere with it. After
finishing “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Nor
rell,” she’d planned to write another
novel set in the same world, but once
she got sick—and even after she’d partly
recovered—the prospect of taking on
another huge book, especially one requir
ing extensive research into nineteenth
century history, seemed insurmount
able. So she dug up “Piranesi,” which
struck her as a much more feasible proj
ect. “My life has been spent largely
housebound for many years,” she told
me. “Yet I don’t think I realized, straight
away, all these resonances” between Pi
ranesi’s captivity and her own. “As soon
as I started working on it seriously, then
I could see them.”
C
larke’s younger sister, Kate, a social
worker, and Greenland both used
the same term to describe her: “selfcon
tained.” The eldest child of a Method
ist minister and his wife, Clarke grew
up in a family that moved every few
years. Kate recalled a family trip to a
holiday cottage in which she was “ab
solutely terrified” by the gruesome sto
ries that Susanna spun for her about the
saints depicted in Victo
rian paintings on the walls.
As a result of the family’s
many relocations, Kate
said, her sister “always felt
a little bit out of time, and
slightly dislocated to the
situation she was in.” As a
writer, Clarke herself told
me, she feels more at home
in the nineteenth century
than she does in the present.
When Clarke was thirteen, the fam
ily moved to the Yorkshire city of Brad
ford, which has landed on more than
one list of the worst places to live in the
U.K. Kate described the city as impov
erished and “very raw”; Clarke, in a short
essay about Bradford for the Guardian,
remembered a pack of feral dogs that
roamed the area, prompting announce
ments over school loudspeakers not to
leave the building until the dogs were
gone. Although she did finally make
friends in Bradford, and even found a
boyfriend, she always felt like an out
sider there, and that cemented her child
hood tendency to withdraw into an
imaginative inner life fuelled by books
and television. (The series “Arthur of
the Britons,” set in the Middle Ages,
was a favorite.)
Clarke was accepted at Oxford, where
she received undistinguished marks in
her course of study, Philosophy, Politics
and Economics. “I’d been going to do
history,” she told me. “And at some point
I changed my mind and went to this.
And I don’t know why.” Upon graduat
ing, she took a series of jobs in book pub
lishing. Then, in her late twenties, she
felt that her social life was “shrinking
down,” and, like many a compatriot be
fore her, she went off to Italy in search
of a more convivial mode of existence.
She recalled, “One of the things I dis
covered by going abroad was that this
sort of magical, wonderful social life,
which I thought I ought to be having—
with lots of friends and a boyfriend and
going out—was actually not what I
wanted. What I wanted to do was to stay
in my room and write.” After her sojourn
in Bilbao, she returned to England, nurs
ing the germ of “Jonathan Strange &
Mr. Norrell.” Originally, she’d planned
to set the novel later in the nineteenth
century, but her affinity for Austen pulled
the setting back to the Regency period.
“I’ve read them and reread
them and reread them,” she
said of Austen’s books. “I feel
very much at home in those
six novels.” She suspects that
it’s because “the world some
how was a bit more human
scaled at that time.”
In November, 1993, she
participated in a weeklong
residential workshop on sci
ence fiction and fantasy,
held at Lumb Bank, a house in York
shire that once belonged to Ted Hughes.
Greenland was one of the instructors.
Each student submitted a story before
the workshop began. Greenland told
me, “I remember opening the enve
lope—this brown envelope—and tak
ing up this short story. It was called ‘The
Ladies of Grace Adieu,’ by Susanna
Clarke, and I started reading. I thought,
What is this? This is amazing.” He called
up his coinstructor, who had also seen
the manuscript, and they “cooed” to each
other about “the Jane Austen one.” Once
the workshop convened, in its snowy,
isolated setting, Greenland felt imme
diately attracted to Clarke, who had the
serene, oval face of a porcelain cameo
and a curtain of prematurely white hair.
But he took pains not to pay too much
attention to her, or to show any favorit
ism. “I must be very professional,” he told
himself. “And not just because she’s the
most talented writer I’ve ever met.” At a
party on the last night of the workshop,
Greenland finally felt free to “monopo
lize” her, and the two began a relation
ship, which never ended up including
much editorial advice from Greenland.
He said of the class, “She didn’t really
want us to do anything other than say,
‘Yes—please keep going.’” He did not
read “Piranesi” until Clarke had com
pleted her first draft. She needed, Green
land said, only for him to tell her, “Yes,
this is a complete thing. This is not a
broken thing or a failed attempt. This
is a book.”
Escorting Clarke’s work from the
hermetic place where it is created to the
outside world has become something
of a vocation for Greenland. His enthu
siasm for “The Ladies of Grace Adieu”
prompted him to send the story to
Gaiman, an old friend of his, without
telling Clarke. Gaiman admired it so
much that he forwarded it to Patrick
Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor Books,
an imprint specializing in fantasy and
science fiction. Hayden soon contacted
a surprised Clarke with an offer to buy
the story for an anthology that he was
editing. She found the experience a lit
tle unsettling but went on to contrib
ute stories to subsequent anthologies of
Hayden’s, while struggling to shape the
fragments that would become “Jona
than Strange & Mr. Norrell.” She was
prone to lose faith in her ability to com
plete the book, and even in the merits
of completing it at all. “I had a melt
down,” she told me. “And I’d had melt
downs before. Colin said, ‘What you
need to do now is to get an agent.’ ”
The late Giles Gordon, a legendary
character at the Curtis Brown agency,
agreed to represent her after reading
only three chapters. To Clarke’s great
amusement, he told her, “If I hadn’t met
