When our story begins, I was a scribbling person, who made stories and such. I moved to the US from England in 1992 and I missed my friends, so I was exceedingly delighted when the post brought a large envelope from one of them, Colin Greenland. Mr Greenland had been one of the first persons I had encountered a decade earlier when I had stumbled into the worlds of science fiction and of fantasy: an elfin gentleman with a faintly piratical air, who wrote excellent books. Inside the envelope was a letter, in which Greenland explained that he had just taught a writing workshop, and that one of the writers at the workshop was a remarkable woman of great talent, and that he wished me to read her work. He enclosed an extract from a short story.

Susanna Clarke on the TV Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: ‘My own characters were walking about!’ Read more

I read it, and wrote back, and demanded more.

This came as some surprise to Susanna Clarke, who had no idea that Colin had sent me an extract from “The Ladies of Grace Adieu”. Gamely, though, she sent me the rest of the story. I loved everything about it: the plot, the magic, the glorious way she put words together, and was particularly delighted by the information in the cover letter that she was writing a novel set in the world of the tale, and that it would be called Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – so delighted that I sent the story to an editor of my acquaintance. He called her and asked to buy her story for an anthology he was editing.

I was excited by the prospect of meeting Clarke, and when I did finally meet her it was in the company of Greenland, who had, shortly after their first encounter, persuaded her to entertain his suit (an odd expression, now I come to write it down. I mean that they had become lovers and partners, not that he had removed his clothes and left them with her while she performed small puppet shows for them). From the stories of hers that I had read I was expecting someone of a fey disposition, perhaps slightly out of her own time, and was pleasantly surprised to meet a sharp, smart woman with a ready smile and easy wit, who loved to talk books and authors. I took particular delight in how well she understood high and low culture, and how comfortably she went between them, seeing them (correctly, in my opinion) not as opposites to be reconciled but as different ways of addressing the same ideas.

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For the next decade, people would ask me who my favourite authors were, and I would place Clarke on any lists I made, explaining that she had written short stories, only a handful but that each was a gem, that she was working on a novel, and that one day everyone would have heard of her. And by everyone, I meant only a small number of people, but those who counted. I assumed that the work of Clarke was a refined taste that would be too unusual and strange for the general public.

In February 2004, to my perplexity and my delight, the mail brought an advance, but finished, copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I took my daughters on holiday to the Cayman Islands, and while they romped and swam in the surf, I was hundreds of years and thousands of miles away, in Regency York and in London and on the continent, experiencing nothing but the purest pleasure, wandering through the words and the things they brought with them, and eventually noticing that the paths and lanes of the story, with its footnotes and its fine phrases, had become a huge road, and it was taking me with it: 782 pages, and I enjoyed every page, and when the book was done I could happily have read 782 more. I loved the things she said and the things she did not say. I loved crabbed Norrell and, less feckless than he seems, Strange, and John Uskglass the Raven King, who is not in the title of the book unless he hides behind the ampersand, but who hovers there anyhow. I loved the supporting players, the footnotes, and the author – she is not, I am convinced, Clarke, but a character in her own right, writing her book closer to Strange and Norrell’s time than our own.

I wrote about the experience of reading the book in my online journal, and I wrote to Susanna’s editor telling her that it was to my mind the finest work of English fantasy written in the past 70 years. (I was thinking that the only thing it could be compared to was Hope Mirlees’s novel Lud-in-the-Mist. Sometimes people would ask me about Tolkien and I would explain that I did not, and do not, think of The Lord of the Rings as English fantasy but as high fantasy.) It was a novel about the reconciliation of the mundane and the miraculous, in which the world of faerie and the world of men are perhaps not as divided as they appear, but might simply be different ways of addressing the same thing.

I was right about how good a book it was, and how much people would like it. I was wrong about one thing, and one thing only, in that I had thought that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell would be a book for the few – that it would touch only a handful of people, and those people deeply, and when they encountered each other they would speak of Arabella, or Stephen Black, or of Childermass or the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair in the way that people talk of old acquaintances, and bonds of friendship would be formed between strangers. I daresay they do, and they are, but there are not a tiny handful of them but an army as big as Wellington’s, or bigger. The book became that rare thing, a fine and wonderful book that found its readers, all across the world, and was garlanded and lauded and awarded and acclaimed.