The author on the trouble with the Brönte novels, what she gained from reading John Updike and Martin Amis – and the brilliance of Barbara Pym
Sarah Moss
Friday 9 January 2026
My earliest reading memory Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome, aged seven. I didn’t learn to read in the first years of school and became entrenched in illiteracy until my grandmother, a retired primary school teacher, intervened. I loved the Swallows and Amazons series, and especially Swallowdale in which a shipwreck is redeemed and the adults provide exactly the right support when the children mess up.
My favourite book growing up The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose politics I now find obviously objectionable. I often tell students that what you don’t get is what gets you, and I’m sure the obsession with rugged independence and the repression of foundational violence did me no good, but I liked the landscapes and the combination of domesticity and adventure.
The book that changed me as a teenager Teenagers are easily led. I saw myself in some of the plain, clever girls of Victorian fiction, reinforcing the 1990s message that cleverness was unattractive and attractiveness was stupid. Young women shouldn’t be allowed to read the mid-century canon until they’ve learned critical thinking; the Beat poets, Updike, Amis et al taught me to see women and the world through the eyes of white men, and also to admire an excellent sentence. I suppose both were useful in their way.
The writer who changed my mind All books change my mind, that’s what they are for. Recently Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes altered the way I understand much of the world around me.
The book that made me want to be a writer I don’t think it was a book. Before I could write, my party trick was storytelling. Sometimes other parents would call the house late at night to have my parents bring me to the phone and admit to my sleepless little friends that the ghost stories I’d told earlier weren’t true.
The author I came back to I’ve just rediscovered Barbara Pym. When I first read her, I was so determined not to become a valiantly cheerful and shabby middle-aged English woman of limited means that I didn’t want to know if they had inner lives. I wouldn’t say I’m now particularly cheerful, valiantly or otherwise, but apart from that – well, let’s just say she’s a brilliant novelist and I was wrong.
The book I reread Most books worth reading are worth rereading. I revisit Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, noticing how their teenaged heroines and wise or bitter older women look different as I age. Other lodestars include Janet Frame’s autobiography, everything written by Miriam Toews, Bill Reid’s essays on art. And we should not forget the books of staying alive either: Meera Sodha’s and Anna Jones’s cookbooks fall open at the right pages and Felix Ford’s and Kate Davies’ knitting books bring happy hours and favourite jumpers.
The book I could never read again I never liked Wuthering Heights as much as Jane Eyre, and these days I can’t see around the eroticised abuse, not that there isn’t some of that in Jane Eyre too. Exemplary narrative structure all the same.
The book I discovered later in life Discovering books is like discovering landscapes; they were already there. I love it when writers reach me in translation decades after they were published: Magda Szabo, Alba De Céspedes, Azar Nafisi.
The book I am currently reading I am a polyamorous reader: Helen Garner’s How to End a Story; Gun-Britt Sundström’s Engagement; Kathleen Jamie’s Selected Poems.
The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss review – a portrait of parental anxiety
With the NHS a central theme, this story about the effect of a child’s illness on her family is a novel for our times
Penelope Lively
Saturday 9 July 2016
Sarah Moss is an impressively flexible writer. Her five novels have ranged over both time and space – historical writing in the last two, the Hebrides and Greenland before that, family life in the present-day English Midlands in The Tidal Zone. And where previously there has been a feminist slant to her writing, with its exploration of the possibilities for talented women in the past, here the narrator is a man, though that is not to say that the discussion about the position of women is sidelined.
Spent Light by Lara Pawson review – the dark side of everyday things
Domestic objects lead to intimate memories and troubled histories in this glorious, genre-bending book
Sarah Moss
Saturado 27 January 2024
Spent Light is subtitled “A Book”. It’s not a memoir, but not really autofiction either; life writing, maybe, but the lives in question are not human. Pawson’s writing is prompted by objects usually considered inanimate but made and traded by people in systems that do harm. The book is among them, a physical object, in case you hadn’t noticed. (The book is interested in things you may not have noticed, or may have chosen not to notice.)
Summerwater by Sarah Moss review – a dark holiday in Scotland
Everyone is hiding something and the rain won’t stop in the Ghost Wall writer’s nightmarish tale of a day spent holidaying by a loch
Melissa Harrinson
Wed 26 August 2020
L
ike a dim shape shifting in the depths of a loch, there is something very dark at work just out of sight in Sarah Moss’s seventh novel. Its title is a reference to “The Ballad of Semerwater” by the poet William Watson, itself based on a legend in which the waters of a lake rise up and drown a village, sparing only the household who have offered a stranger from a distant land food and drink.
Narrative tricks minted in the 19th century are still working in contemporary fiction by authors from Margaret Atwood to Sarah Waters
Paraic O’Donnell Wed 7 Nov 2018 10.00 GMT
I
n historical fiction, as in all things, fashions come and go. As we near the end of Hilary Mantel’s glorious Tudor revival, the ancient world is again getting a look in, with writers such as Madeline Miller and Pat Barker refashioning the Homeric epics to glittering effect. But these trends mask more durable patterns, at least from a crudely chronological point of view.
For one thing, the 19th century – the Regency and Victorian eras, in other words – remains vastly overrepresented. In an informal 2013 survey by the Historical Novel Society, it accounted for almost 30% of that year’s titles, second only to the 20th in popularity, and with almost as large a share as all other eras put together. What accounts for this enduring fascination? Proximity plays a part, naturally, and the richness of the documentary record probably doesn’t hurt either. Empires need prodigious bureaucracies, and if there’s one thing the Victorians were spectacularly good at, it was writing things down.
For my part – well, I won’t lie. Some of it comes down to aesthetics. In The House on Vesper Sands, I wanted to dramatise wickedness and secrecy. For that you need darkness, snow and plenty of orphans. More high-mindedly, I wanted to rehabilitate the Victorian sensation novel, in which – long before the modernists thought of it – the author’s own trickery is playfully advertised. In other words – and each of the books I’ve chosen reflects this in one way or another – the Victorians didn’t just perfect the English novel. They made it self-aware.
While literary critics have occasionally embraced historical fiction, academic literary theorists have taken a harder line. They take a dim view of representing things generally, but especially of representing the past. This novel isn’t just aware of all this; it gleefully writes it into the plot. Its intricate parallel narratives involve a pair of fusty academics who discover both a secret affair between two Victorian poets and a hesitant passion of their own. The resulting novel (or rather, “romance”, both in the literary sense and the usual one) manages to be both extravagantly learned and utterly charming.
2. Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss (2014)
Since this novel’s appearance in 2014, Moss’s star has rightfully risen. Bodies of Light deserves consideration alongside her finest work, and exhibits her peculiar gift for slipping among disparate settings (from Greenland to the Outer Hebrides) while maintaining unusual strands of continuity. Here again she is preoccupied with motherhood and the fragility of the self, and while her Victorian foray begins with the unearthing of infant bones, she is always digging into the human soul, including – or so it can often seem – the reader’s own.
3. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (2002)
This justly celebrated reinvention of the Dickensian novel is not so much a reboot as a kick in the arse. Unlike Dickens, Faber has no time for the sanctified waif or the virtuous simpleton. As in Bleak House, we are introduced first to the city itself, with a warning that we must start at the very bottom. In Faber’s London, the fog hides nothing and the veils are all drawn back. Here a prostitute squats unceremoniously over her bowl to scour herself, while outside the blood runs among the cobbles “like a winding crimson weed”.
Lesbian love story primer ... Elaine Cassidy (left) and Sally Hawkins in the 2005 TV adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith. Photograph: BBC/Sally Head Productions
4. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002)
A landmark of lesbian fiction, this suffered the unusual fate of becoming famous for the wrong reasons. The novel’s central love story should never be whitewashed, but it spawned a cottage industry of softcore Victoriana that overshadowed its author’s virtuosity. With its loveable rogues and dastardly schemes, Fingersmith has all the elements of the worst kind of knockabout pastiche, yet what Waters fashions from them is almost miraculous. From intricate plotting to exquisitely subtle observation, she is that rare prodigy: an author who is good at everything. Like her heroine, Sue, we see as a small child does “what I had never seen before – how the world was made up”.
Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett in the title roles of the film version of Oscar and Lucinda.
5. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988)
The unlikely love story that begins when Lucinda Leplastrier encounters Oscar Hopkins on a ship bound for Australia has become one of the most cherished of recent times. Yet it is a love story, Carey has confessed, that he ended up writing almost by mistake. Instead, the novel’s glittering and unforgettable central motif, a glass church floating on a river, had struck Carey as crystallising (if you will) Pascal’s notion of religious belief as a grand gamble. Oscar is an inveterate gambler, of course, but if he accepts Lucinda’s bet out of compulsion, agreeing to transport her fragile edifice into the remote outback, his persistence in this harebrained undertaking has given us one of literature’s most monumental acts of love.
6. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996)
Atwood has always given us big ideas, but she hasn’t always shown as much interest in people. Alias Grace is as much a novel of ideas as any she has written, but is centred for once on a transfixing study of character. Grace Marks was a real (and notorious) historical character, an Irish maid convicted in 1843 of a brutal double murder. While brilliantly dramatising the Victorian urge to medicalise femininity, this novel dignifies its central character even as it wrings from the question of her guilt a merciless degree of suspense.
Michael Caine and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige. Photograph: Stephen Vaughan/AP
7. The Prestige by Christopher Priest (1995)
Christopher Nolan’s darkly glamorous film version made this the best known of Priest’s books. While it did justice to the novel’s duelling Victorian stage magicians, it jettisoned its contemporary framing and, in doing so, much of its psychological subtlety. In Priest’s original telling, the historical rivals are discovered by a down-on-his-luck writer named Andrew Westley. As the magicians stalk one another, each maddened by the mystery of the other’s “prestige” (or trick), Westley is haunted by a phantom twin, and it is the reader who must discover the true nature of the illusion.
8. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (2013)
Set in the New Zealand of the 1860s, this novel transports us not to the midst of Victoria’s reign but to the very periphery of her possessions, a disparity that Catton’s immense novel ingeniously exploits. Taking on the guise of a genteel pastiche, its customs seem familiar at first, but we soon find ourselves in unmapped territory. The intricate plot (involving a vanished prospector, a missing fortune and an ailing prostitute) is absorbing but becomes almost incidental, with Catton’s fiendish use of omniscient perspective purporting to show us everything while keeping us artfully in the dark.
9. Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge (1998)
Shortlisted for the Booker prize five times, it was not until after her death in 2010 thatBainbridge was finally honoured with a specially created award. Although it was chosen from among her novels by a popular vote, Master Georgie is one of Bainbridge’s most challenging and austere works. Indeed, she herself remarked that most people needed to read it three times before they understood it. She may have been right. With its carefully modulated perspectives and slyly observed details, this refracted Bildungsroman follows a young surgeon’s almost helpless progress towards the muck and depravity of the Crimean war, and it reveals new and brilliant facets no matter how often you come back to it.
10. The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds (2009)
Set in Epping Forest in 1840, The Quickening Maze examines the unlikely circumstances that brought the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson into brief conjunction. Clare’s alcoholism and declining artistic fortunes have brought him to High Beach Asylum, while the young and untested Tennyson, a guest of the asylum-keeper, is so self-absorbed that he scarcely notices the amorous attentions of his host’s young daughter. Animating such looming and disparate figures could have made for heavy going, but Foulds gives them human scale and careful shading, illuminating all he touches with his swift and shimmering prose.
