Susanna Clarke
Susanna Clarke was born on November 1, 1959, in Nottingham, England, and grew up in various parts of northern England and Scotland as the daughter of a Methodist minister. She read history at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, graduating in 1981, and subsequently worked as a cookery book editor in Turin and as an English language teacher in Bilbao before returning to England. She spent many years working as an editor for Simon & Schuster in Cambridge, where she lived with the writer Colin Greenland. She began writing fiction in the early 1990s, publishing short stories set in the world of English magic that would eventually become her first novel. Her creative process is notably unhurried: she has published only two books in a career of more than two decades, but both have been received as works of major originality.
Her short story “The Ladies of Grace Adieu” appeared in Neil Gaiman’s anthology Starlight 1 in 1996 and drew considerable attention, but it was the decade-in-the-making novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) that made her reputation. The novel imagines an alternative history of England in which magic is a real but long-dormant force, and follows two very different magicians — the cautious, scholarly Mr. Norrell, who aims to restore English magic in controlled, respectable fashion, and the brilliant, reckless Jonathan Strange, his pupil and eventual rival — against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. The novel is a work of extraordinary scope and invention, constructed in the style of a nineteenth-century triple-decker novel, complete with footnotes that elaborate a vast alternative history of English magic with the pedantic detail of genuine scholarship.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell won the Hugo Award and the British Book Award for Best Debut Novel, and sold millions of copies worldwide. It was praised by every major literary novelist and fantasy writer who reviewed it: Neil Gaiman called it “unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years.” Its achievement lies in the way Clarke reconciles two apparently irreconcilable modes: the precise, psychologically realistic social world of Austen and Dickens, rendered with pitch-perfect period voice, and a genuinely disturbing, otherworldly fantastic imagination centered on the figure of the Raven King, the half-human, half-fairy magician who ruled northern England centuries before the novel begins. The footnotes alone constitute a work of considerable literary invention.
Clarke suffered from a debilitating illness — ultimately diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome/ME — that prevented her from writing at the pace she had hoped for, and her second book, Piranesi (2020), did not appear until sixteen years after her debut. A novella of entirely different character — compact, strange, and intensely atmospheric — it follows a man who lives alone in a vast House whose halls are flooded by tidal seas and populated only by statues, and who keeps meticulous journals trying to understand his world. Piranesi won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the World Fantasy Award and confirmed that Clarke’s imagination operated at the highest level across very different scales and modes.
Susanna Clarke is one of the most original imaginations in contemporary English literature, a writer who has demonstrated that the fantastic, handled with sufficient literary seriousness, can achieve the full range of effects available to the realist novel. Her work belongs in a tradition of English literary fantasy that includes George MacDonald, E. R. Eddison, and Tolkien, but her particular achievement — the fusion of the Austenian social novel with genuinely unsettling fairy-tale darkness — is entirely her own. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is likely to endure as one of the major works of early twenty-first-century English fiction.
