Virago Press

I have been working on a new novel for a couple of months: it is coming along quite nicely, but is still very much in its early stages, so I don't want to say too much about it... I can tell you that the action takes place in the late 1940s (sorry - not contemporary), but not in London: it has a rural setting, which at the moment, for various reasons, is Warwickshire. It's very much about post-war social changes, but it is also quite gothic. And there are no lesbians in it! - which is a bit of a departure for me, and brings me nicely to your second question... I am of course aware of having a lesbian and a mainstream audience now, but I can't say I write 'for' either one of them: I write for myself really; I write the sort of novels I hope I'd like to read. One of the biggest pleasures of writing fiction for me is in being able to spend a long time pursuing a set of issues or ideas, and turning them into a novel. Another big pleasure is seeing that novel come alive when other people read and enjoy it. I'm glad you enjoy my storytelling. I do see myself first and foremost as a storyteller - rather than, say, as a 'lesbian writer' or a 'historical novelist'.

The way you've written The Night Watch is unusual, chronologically. What gave you the idea to structure the novel in this way? Did it present any problems? (Maria, Birmingham, UK)

I didn't plan this right at the start, but when I made the decision to try it, it made the book make sense for me: I realised that my characters when we first meet them are all in thrall to their pasts and can't move on; the novel follows their backward glances - or, to use a different analogy, it becomes a sort of archaeological excavation of their emotional lives. It didn't present too many problems, actually: but given that the most dramatic section is Part Two, my main worry was whether my reader would stay with me through Part One, which is more static and enigmatic.

Your first three books are set during the Victorian period. What drew you to the 1940s? (Karen, Brisbane, Australia)

Basically, I wanted a change. And I wanted to see what kind of novel I would produce if I did move period. I liked the brittle sort of 1940s glamour I'd seen in old British movies, and wanted to have a go at capturing that for a lesbian agenda. And I knew a bit about what had happened to women generally during the war, and after it: it seemed like rather fertile ground...

I was wondering if Sarah Waters had anything to say about the role of pearls in her novels. They seem to appear in one form or another in each of them and I just wondered what her thoughts might be. (Maggie, Portland, Oregon, USA)

Yes, pearls do seem to crop up... As does wax... I think that every writer has a fund of images and metaphors to which they tend to return: pearls are clearly part of mine. I can't really account for it except to say that they are lovely things, with a secret, suggestive sort of history; that there's something very feminine about them, which obviously suits my stories; that they're beautiful and seductive, and yet have that speck of grit in the middle... However, so far I don't think there are any pearls in my new book; might be time to work one in...

I found the period tone of the book amazingly authentic - did any books (or films) of the time help her to capture that? (Diana, Kent, UK)

Yes, lots of books and lots of films! As well as the non-fiction books I mention in The Night Watch's acknowledgements, I was inspired by many of the period's great novels: Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, books by Elizabeth Taylor, Henry Green, Nigel Balchin, Nevile Shute, Rose Macaulay, Patrick Hamilton, Betty Miller... As for films: one of my starting-points for the book was my all-time favourite Brief Encounter; others specifically about wartime life gave me lots of great details: The Way to the Stars, Millions Like Us, In Which We Serve, Went the Day Well, the barmy A Canterbury Tale, and lots of others. I'm still addicted to '40s movies. Thank God for afternoon TV!

Did the period in which The Night Watch is set mean that you carried out your research in a different way to the Victorian novels? Did you conduct interviews with people who were alive in the 1940s? (David, London, UK)

Yes, the research was a whole different ball game. I had lots of new resources: film, sound recordings, photographs, tons of personal testimonies as well as wartime paraphernalia like ration books and civil defence leaflets. And yes, a crucial difference was that the period is still very much within living memory. I did talk to older people; and most usefully, I gave a few of them the manuscript to read, because I felt that if I got details wrong they would leap off the page. Mostly, however, I relied on wartime diaries and other contemporary accounts. Memory is, after all, an unreliable thing. Diaries also gave me language, slang - the idiom of the time.

The Night Watch is very different from Sarah's other books. I'm sure Sarah will be asked about why she changed era, but what I'd like to know is what caused her to change perspective from first person (in the other books) to third? Why did she decide to make that jump for this book? (Sue, Aberystwyth, Wales)

The move from first person to third person was quite a hard one for me to make: it feels much more natural to me to tell a story by having it narrated by one of the novel's characters. But I could sense early on that the third-person would suit The Night Watch better. It was partly a question of mood. Victorian fiction is full of compelling first-person voices - Jane Eyre's, for example, or Pip's in Great Expectations - and my first three novels are very at home in that tradition. But 1940s fiction is a lot drier, a lot chillier; there's a sort of disenchantment to the period that I wanted to try and capture, and a slightly knowing third-person narrative voice seemed appropriate. Also, more practically, I needed my narrator in The Night Watch to know more than each individual character: they don't see the bigger picture; but the narrator and the reader do.

Which of your books do you think lends itself most naturally to screen adaptation? (Danielle, Nottingham, UK)

Hm, I'm not sure. In a way Tipping The Velvet was perfect for TV, because it's so visual, and it's episodic - picaresque. Affinity would be relatively straightforward (and cheap!) to do, because it's essentially a series of interiors. I was doubtful that The Night Watch would ever get adapted, because of its backward and rather fragmented structure - but the BBC are developing it at the moment, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with it.

Kay was a heroine during the war but in peacetime she's a lost soul. I can imagine that would have been the case for many, perhaps especially women, who were then given responsibilities they'd never had before. Did you find during your research that this condition was common? (Anna, Hove, UK)

I heard this anecdotally from people many times, and it certainly crops up as a theme in post-war fiction - for example in Nevile Shute's great, rather strange Requiem for a Wren, which has a displaced, unhappy post-war woman committing suicide. It crops up even in a very silly novel like Nancy Spain's crime caper The Kat Strikes: Spain's heroine has been sent on special missions during the war, and can't settle back into peace-time life; craving adventure, she gets drawn into all sorts of dangerous situations. Other crime novels, such as Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke, are concerned with the sinister post-war potential of men who've effectively been turned by their wartime experiences into trained killers. Lots of people, I think, had problems adapting back to peacetime. For women like Kay the post-war emphasis on domesticity and the feminine 'New Look' must have been awful.

Do you feel you have a duty to write about lesbian relationships because in the eras your work is set in, lesbian love was barely written about? To give the silent a voice. (Anne-Marie, Cornwall, UK)

I'm certainly aware that, when dealing with lesbian and gay history, you're often trying to recover voices that have been lost or overlooked or, as you say, silenced; but I don't really see that recovery as a duty, or even as the prime motivation for my writing. It just feels natural to me to look for lesbian stories. It feels fascinating, too. How did those women feel about each other? How did they feel about themselves? How did they present themselves to the world? But also: what things did they do and experience that were just like the things that everybody does and experiences? Lesbianism is at the heart of my books; but it's also quite incidental, too.

What writers have inspired you the most? (Sophie, London, UK)

Angela Carter was a hugely inspiring writer for me; other writers I've admired include Dickens, Wilkie Collins, the Brontes, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Gregory, Chris Hunt, Toni Morrison, Patrick McGrath, Jeanette Winterson, Elizabeth Taylor, Patricia Highsmith... I like to think that, if you put all these novelists into a blender and whizzed them up, they'd produce me - well, me in a much better version.

Would you consider writing a sequel to any of your books? (and maybe then we'll know whether Margaret from Affinity threw herself into the Thames or not - please tell me she didn't.) (Lizzie, San Francisco, USA)

The girlfriend I had when I was writing Affinity used to want me to send Margaret on a typewriting course at the end of the book, and set her up as a New Woman. Alas, I fear Margaret's fate was actually a lot darker... No, I have never imagined writing a sequel to any of my novels. God-like, I love my characters dearly, but they exist for me only as servants to the larger design of the book they happen to be in. I often think of my novels as being like those little snow-globes: it's all in there, complete and sealed up. It would be wrong to break the glass.