Features

For just over a year now, home for Sarah Waters has been an 18th-century townhouse in south London. It’s exactly the place fans of her books would expect her to live: grand but comfortable, with a tidy balance of original features and modern embellishments, such as the bright, book-lined attic conversion she uses as an office. Some old houses shed their identities over time. But hers glows with history to the point where it evokes, somehow, all the people who have ever lived here.

This may be a significant number. Sipping tea at the kitchen table, Waters points out that London’s Georgian squares, so romanticised by us today, were originally designed to cram in as many tenants as possible. The sense Londoners can’t help having of what she calls ‘the density of lived lives’ is one of the things she loves about the city.

A youthful 42, Waters has an infectious intellectual enthusiasm and the unnerving habit of discussing her novels like the Open University English lecturer she once was – with rigorous, clinical detachment. Only when she breaks off every so often to worry that some aspect of her work might have disappointed readers does she seem to remember that she wrote them.

Waters found success early in her career with the books she calls, with characteristic self-deprecation, ‘lesbian Victorian romps’ – Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith – then changed gear for The Night Watch in 2006. Starting in 1947 and working backwards to 1941, The Night Watch was sedate and interiorised where its predecessors had been frantic and flashy.

More concerned with character than switchback plotting, and with the sense of claustrophobia that comes with long-term relationships than the thrill of sexual discovery, it was also the first Sarah Waters novel to do without the ironising, distancing gloss of genre. (The books to which it did refer, wartime classics such as Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, resist being corralled into a neat category.) This may be why it felt so dark – dark enough for Waters to promise one interviewer that her next book would be ‘more upbeat’. But upbeat isn’t quite the right word for The Little Stranger, is it? 

Waters laughs. ‘Well, it’s not downbeat in the way that The Night Watch was. That was about disappointed, unhappy people. The Little Stranger is more about trapped people.’ This is true. It’s also something of a return to genre: a country-house ghost story, although one where there’s so much else going on that the ghost story becomes both central and oddly incidental.

The Little Stranger is set in 1947 in a small Warwickshire village and narrated by a doctor called Faraday, a diligent, upright man. He is a bachelor, frustrated with his lot in life, whose dull round is shaken up when he is summoned to one of the local ‘big houses’, Hundreds Hall, to attend their one remaining maid, Betty, who complains of stomach pains. On the strength of this and subsequent visits, Faraday becomes friendly with the Hall’s owners, the Ayres family: regal Mrs Ayres; her son Roderick, a former fighter pilot badly injured during the war; and her daughter Caroline, renowned locally for her cleverness – and her plain looks.

They are, of course, Faraday’s social superiors. But they’re also anachronisms whose way of life is dying out. Hundreds Hall was once magnificent (Faraday remembers, as a child, attending a lavish party given by the Ayres to celebrate Empire Day) but now it’s falling apart, like so many other grand houses. Most of its land has been sold off to developers. And, to cap it all, it’s almost impossible, in this postwar world, to recruit the servants who once ran it so efficiently. One of these servants, the nurserymaid, was Faraday’s own mother, which both cements and complicates his friendship with the Ayres. It means he’s in a dual position when the house is plagued by a series of terrifying, inexplicable events: insider and outsider, observer and participant.   

The Little Stranger had a less agonised gestation than The Night Watch, which took four years to write, but grew out of the research work Waters did for that earlier novel. ‘I kept seeing again and again in novels and diaries this sense that, just after the war, class was in crisis as far as middle-class people were concerned. You had a Labour government, suburbia starting to encroach on the countryside, working-class people preferring to work in factories than go into service. Between 1940 and 1960 was the period when the majority of country houses were given up by their owners and either demolished or turned into hotels or teacher training colleges. Their land was sold off for council houses.’

This is the period Evelyn Waugh calls, in Brideshead Revisited, ‘the Age of Hooper’, Hooper being a lower-middle-class platoon commander and a symbol of all Waugh hated about the modern world. 

‘That’s right. I’d been thinking a lot about Brideshead and other country-house novels. One in particular, actually: The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey. It’s about a working-class girl who’s abducted by a mother and daughter living in an isolated house. It’s brilliant in lots of ways, but repellent; the narrator’s sympathies are completely with the middle-class people and the girl is made a repository for all this class loathing. At first I wanted to do a rewrite of it, but I worried that Tey’s estate might not be happy. So I decided to find another way to explore that landscape.’
In fact, the upper-class characters in The Little Stranger are surprisingly sympathetic. Waters gently satirises Faraday’s aspirations, which become more concrete as the novel proceeds and his reliability as a narrator becomes an issue, but the Ayres mostly treat him with respect. They’re certainly grateful for his rationalist tenor when only supernatural explanations seem to fit.

‘At the beginning I had no affection for the upper-class characters at all,’ Waters admits. ‘I thought: these terrible toffs, they must be swept away. And then of course I grew to like them, especially Caroline, the daughter, who started off as this rather hearty county woman and became more sympathetic as I thought more about her predicament. She’s a plain, clever woman who can’t play the femininity game and is actually better suited to running the estate than Roderick.’

The Little Stranger has no overt lesbian content. But some readers will wonder – perhaps even fantasise – about Caroline. ‘I knew you were going to say that,’ Waters says, grinning. ‘I don’t think she’s a lesbian. I really don’t. I mean, she might be. Lots of country women are – all that hunting, shooting and fishing – but it wasn’t part of my agenda here. The story came along and it was very obviously to me not a lesbian story. I thought in advance that that might make the writing experience different somehow. But in fact it didn’t. The only thing I missed at first was the element of desire, which has often rather driven my narratives in the past. But then I discovered all sorts of other desires and conflicts in the novel, so that took care of that.’ She chuckles. ‘I couldn’t help making Caroline a bit butch, though.’

Sarah Waters was born in 1966 in Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire. Her father was an oil engineer, her mother ‘what we used to call a housewife’. It wasn’t a bookish household and Waters had no particular ambition to be a writer. She read English at university, but only after studying for a PhD in lesbian and gay fiction did she decide to have a bash at concocting some herself. She wrote her first novel, the music-hall picaresque Tipping the Velvet, while on the dole and living in a tower-block council flat in Brixton, south London. Every publisher she sent the finished manuscript to rejected it, including her current publisher Virago, though they reconsidered after the agent she subsequently acquired submitted it a second time.

Inevitably, critics focused on the novel’s lesbian high jinks, and it became a tabloid cause célèbre in 2002 when Andrew Davies adapted it for TV, promising giant dildos and general ‘filthiness’ (see overleaf). Just as noticeable, however, is Waters’ broader interest in British social history. It runs through all the books, especially The Little Stranger, though Waters makes a face when I call her a historian manqué. ‘My knowledge is really patchy. Lucy, my partner, is always asking me questions about the 19th century and I’ve no idea. She says, “But you’re a Victorianist!”

‘It’s funny. I thought a lot about my background while I was writing this book. My nan was a nurserymaid in a big house. My dad’s parents met in London when they were both in service. Both my parents were working-class grammar school kids. But I’ve been to university, so I’m middle-class. In a sense, it’s the story of British life in the 20th century.’

Affinity was the first Waters novel to advertise her fascination with ghosts and the supernatural – one she says she’s had since she was a child. ‘I’ve still got all my copies of The Unexplained magazine in the loft. I can’t bear to throw them away! I was obsessed with all that stuff until embarrassingly late. As a 15-year-old, when I should have been dating boys or taking drugs, I was sitting in my bedroom reading Erich von Daniken [author of UFO classic Chariots of the Gods] and Doctor Who Monthly. Writing The Little Stranger did feel like it put me back in touch with my childhood self, which was really nice.’

Earlier this year, the West Yorkshire Paranormal Group invited Waters and her partner to spend a night in a haunted house. Did they accept? ‘Of course! It was Plas Newydd in Llangollen where the Ladies of Llangollen [celebrated historical lesbians] lived. I thought I owed it to my eight-year-old self to do it. But it was funny. The moment we got in there and the lights were off, I found I didn’t want anything to happen. Because, if you let something through, where would it end? What would it imply about the world? Anyway, nothing happened, at least nothing I felt. But the others thought they’d caught something on film.’

The Little Stranger is full of things not quite seen or heard. Like all the best ghost stories, it knows the importance of suggestion and ambiguity. Every reader will have his or her own ideas about who or what the ‘ghost’ at Hundreds Hall is, and that’s how Waters wants it. ‘I tried not to set it up as if what’s going on is definitely a ghost. I started the book determined not to do any of the obvious haunted-house things. That’s why I chose a Georgian house – they’re so calm and rational and square. But I found myself making it more Gothic; slightly alive, with nerves running through it, and pink inside like a mouth that’s about to swallow you up.’

Waters has always been fantastic at channelling characters’ voices, and here she excels herself; Faraday, the first male narrator she’s attempted, is completely convincing. She’s brilliant, too, on the social aspects of village life – as good as her writer-heroine Elizabeth Taylor. In 1947, you were defined almost totally by your position within a cruelly complicated social hierarchy. Everything Faraday does betrays his status as a working-class child made good. Everything people say to him reflects their awareness of who and what he is. Little wonder he’s frustrated, lonely and lacking in confidence – terrified, too, about what the NHS, newly created to provide ordinary folk like him with ‘cradle to grave’ care, will mean for his livelihood.   

Waters has admitted in the past to worrying that all she’s really good at is pastiche – a barbarously harsh judgement. She’s clearly a great writer on all sorts of levels. She wasn’t being serious, surely? ‘I haven’t thought about it for a while, so maybe I do feel more comfortable about it now. I like writing novels that are accessible, but maybe that’s just me making a virtue of necessity. I’m never going to be Virginia Woolf, never going to be a stylist or an experimentalist. I always seem to have this urge to refer back, either to specific novels or to an older tradition of writing. I don’t think that’s the only way to write historical fiction; someone like John Fowles was brilliant at doing it with a modern voice. But it’s the way I’ve always enjoyed doing it.’
Promoting a new novel doesn’t leave much time for writing. But when Waters’ next novel does start to take shape, will it be ‘more upbeat’?

Waters laughs. ‘Oh yes. But then, I always say that.’

Further reading

The Little Stranger
by Sarah Waters
Virago
Buy now