The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke

She signed up for a five-day fantasy and science-fiction writing workshop, co-taught by science fiction and fantasy writers Colin Greenland and Geoff Ryman. Īfter she returned from Spain in 1993, Clarke began to think seriously about writing her novel.

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and afterwards was inspired to ' writing a novel of magic and fantasy'. And I felt strongly that he had some sort of magical background – he'd been dabbling in magic, and something had gone badly wrong.' She had also recently reread J. Main article: Jonathan Strange & Mr NorrellĬlarke first developed the idea for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell while she was teaching in Bilbao: 'I had a kind of waking dream . about a man in 18th-century clothes in a place rather like Venice, talking to some English tourists. In 1993, she was hired by Simon & Schuster in Cambridge to edit cookbooks, a job she kept for the next ten years. There she began working on her first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. She returned to England in 1992 and spent the rest of that year in County Durham, in a house that looked out over the North Sea. She spent two years teaching English as a foreign language in Turin, Italy and Bilbao, Spain. įor eight years, she worked in publishing at Quarto and Gordon Fraser. She studied philosophy, politics, and economics at St Hilda's College, Oxford, receiving her degree in 1981. Owing to her father's posts, she spent her childhood in various towns across Northern England and Scotland, and enjoyed reading the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen. While Strange focuses on the relationship of two men, Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell, the stories in Ladies focus on the power women gain through magic.Ĭlarke's second novel, Piranesi, was published in September 2020, winning the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction.Ĭlarke was born on 1 November 1959 in Nottingham, England, the eldest daughter of a Methodist minister and his wife. Both Clarke's debut novel and her short stories are set in a magical England and written in a pastiche of the styles of 19th-century writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Two years later, she published a collection of her short stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (2006). For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication. Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time.

Susanna Mary Clarke (born 1 November 1959) is an English author known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), a Hugo Award-winning alternative history.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke