1 of 2
Susan Howatch, 57, is author of many novels, including most recently The Wonder Worker. She spoke with B&C from her home in London.
While you now live in London, for a time you lived in Salisbury, which is the background for the Starbridge novels. The town seems to have had a profound affect on you.
When I was down in Salisbury I had a very small apartment which was about a hundred yards from the west front of the cathedral. So for about three years I lived with that building. It had the most extraordinary effect on me. I was hypnotized by seeing it in all weathers and times of day and night. Gradually it got to me.
I wasn't a churchgoer. I wasn't particularly religious when I went down to Salisbury, but I became interested. Various things happened in my professional and personal life that were quite upsetting, and I began to wonder what life was really all about. I wouldn't call it a midlife crisis. I always think a midlife crisis is when you cling to your youth. I would say instead it was the beginning of what they call a "second journey." This is when you reach a crossroads in life and you're keen to move on. I began to read about Christianity and the church, and I was living with this enormous architectural monster outside my window, so there were many things that fused together and produced the Starbridge books.
It was quite a change from your previous writing.
My personal life was a wreck at the time, and I'd come to the end of the kind of books I used to write. When I wrote the last of my long sagas and it was just treated like another airport book, I was discouraged. I felt I was just beginning to say something interesting, but nobody wanted to know. So when I wrote the first of the Starbridge books, I didn't submit it to publishers. I put it away in a drawer because I wasn't actually sure whether I wanted to publish it. I wasn't sure whether God wanted me to publish it. Should I go on writing novels or should I go back to college and do a degree in theology and teach, or what was I supposed to do? So I wrote this one just for my own personal pleasure.
Then I found that I really had to begin a second Starbridge book, and it was only after I was almost finished that that my American agent came over from New York and asked if she could have a little peek at the manuscript. I showed it to her, and then I had to show the two novels, of course, to my British agent, and both agents advised me to publish. That was like a green light saying, "Okay, go on, continue writing novels, but you will go on in a very different way."
When beginning the second journey you reach the crossroads, and you can either turn aside and do something quite new or you can go on but in a very different way. It wasn't as in the old days in which I just wanted to make a lot of money and be famous. This time I felt that it didn't matter. If this was what God required me to do, then my job was just to write them as well as I could, and then he would use it in whatever way he thought best. It was very liberating.
In your novels, spiritual direction is extremely important. Were there any mature Christians in your life at this time who were giving you any comfort or advice?
No. I was living as a recluse. I was not a churchgoer. I knew no one. I had a religious conversion in about 1983. I didn't become a regular churchgoer until about 1988 when I left Salisbury and was living in London.
How would you describe your own faith stance today?
I would say I'm a conservative liberal. I believe in holding to the tradition, but I like to experiment outside it, or at least speculate.
I expect one of the things that makes some of your conservative church fellows nervous is your interest in psychology and religion.
share this page
RSS Feed
