In Nell Stevens’s second novel, The Original, set at the end of the nineteenth century, a sailor thought to have died at sea writes to his mother from abroad, seeking her assistance to come home. The man is, or says he is, Charles Inderwick, the heir to the Inderwick family fortune, and his mother recognises him instantly as her son. Events are narrated by Charles’s secretive orphaned cousin, Grace, who, as a queer woman and a copyist of paintings, finds it necessary to conceal herself to remain at Inderwick Hall. “This is a story about fakes and what it means for something to be real,” says Stevens, “and whether, in the end, it matters.”
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Nell, before we begin, I have to warn you that the internet over here is quite jumpy.
I can see you fine! Where are you?
Sussex, where are you? What’s the weather like?
I’m in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. It is grey and mild and boring.
Grey and mild and boring here too. How long have you been in Woodstock?
We moved two and a half, nearly three years ago. We were in north London, expecting our daughter and in need of more space. I grew up in Oxford, so we know it, and my parents are here.
I think I read in your acknowledgements that you have two kids now?
Yes, our daughter is nearly three, and our son is four. We are in it. Do you have kids?
Mine are six, three, and five months. Isn’t four years old around the age they start inching towards civility?
Have you read that great book, Zagazoo, by Quentin Blake?
No!
This couple gets sent a baby, and it’s lovely. And then it turns into all of these different, horrifying creatures. There’s a moment when it’s a warthog, and then a dragon, and every time, they’re like, “What are we going to do, what are we going to do!?”
And then right at the end, it goes, “And then one day, Zagazoo” – the baby’s named Zagazoo – “turned into a charming young man with perfect manners.” I always tear up, because I cannot wait for my charming young man with perfect manners. My daughter is downstairs with my wife, by the way, and you may well hear some screams.
My youngest is downstairs with my husband, and you’ll probably hear him too. We’ll figure it out.
We’ll figure it out.
You wrote this beautiful, twisty, evocative book with two very small children around.
Well, this book was written between the hours of 5am and 6:30am.
Tell me all about it, please.
It was actually horrific. I mean, I’m a morning person, I like to get up early, but not that early. And I wrote it between October and the end of December, so it was really dark.
You wrote it in two months? In the mornings?
Yes, it was intense. Very fast, very early hours, very sudden. That’s every book of mine, though. Long periods of inactivity followed by a spurt of activity, and it all comes out.
I was teaching as well, so that was the only time I had. I got up, and I was scared of waking the kids up, and I thought if I turned the light on they would know. Our bedroom is at the top of the house and the kids sleep on the middle floor, so I was sneaking past them to get downstairs and write on the sofa. And then there would be some shenanigans with the dog, always, because she sleeps in the kitchen and she would realise that I was up. So I would calm the dog and she would come and sleep on my feet on the sofa. It was really dark because the only light I had on – this is little kid land, right? – was a lava lamp.
I like that this acclaimed literary novel was written by the light of the lava lamp.
It was a little bit like a flickering candle, you know? Maybe that was giving me some atmosphere. Anyway, that was how this book was written. Ridiculous and not easily repeatable. I don’t think I would do it again.
I’ve not worked that way before – getting up in what still sort of feels like the night time. And because of that, I actually don’t really remember much. This is a very plotty book in comparison to what I’ve written before, and there are sections in it that take me by surprise, because I think part of me was still asleep.
There’s a lot about darkness, literal darkness I mean, in the book. I recall a passage where the protagonist, Grace, is on her way to Yorkshire, and she observes that everything happens in the dark: she arrives at towns along the way in the dark, moves down dark hallways to her rooms at various inns, departs again in the dark…
I do actually remember writing that bit, because at that point, towards the end of the book, I was getting stressed about meeting the deadline, and I’d started getting up at 4:30am. It was really dark.
I’m glad I wrote this book and I’m proud of it, but I don’t think I would choose this way of writing again – unless I was really desperate.
It’s interesting that The Original was written in such pressured circumstances. The plot is tense, but essentially, it’s a generous book. I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say it has a very satisfying ending.
Oh good, did you think so? You know, I think a lot of people didn’t find this to be a happy ending. I think it’s happy too.
Have you read Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey? Another classic fraud novel, but I bring it up because it also has a tightly wound, nervy plot and what I would call an upbeat conclusion.
Yes, it’s great. I didn’t get to Brat Farrar until after I’d finished writing, but The Original owes a lot to the Tichborne case, a nineteenth-century identity dispute that became a sensation. Essentially, this man Arthur Orton, the son of a butcher, comes forward to say that he’s the aristocrat Roger Tichborne, a long-lost heir who was presumed dead at sea. And even though there are all of these glaring impossibilities that would suggest Arthur couldn’t be Roger – Roger could speak French, for instance, and Arthur couldn’t – Roger’s mother immediately accepts that it’s him. And then there are all of these servants and various people who turn up and say it’s definitely him.
In The Original, it feels as though there’s a great appreciation for impostors.
We are all, now, amateur-verging-on-professional storytellers of our identities online. That has become so much of what we do as a culture. So I think there is something about the way we tell stories about ourselves that makes us interested in fakes and forgery, because we’re all aware of the fakeness of what we put forward.
I also think there’s something compelling about making a claim to property specifically, because it feels so out of reach now for so many people. Owning a house is so much harder than it was 50 years ago, it’s a fantasy, and that’s a feeling that Arthur Orton probably understood. He was a butcher from Wapping who knew he was never going to get a big house, he was never going to get a big estate, unless he managed to pull off this extraordinary con.
Do you have some personal sympathy with fakes and forgery?
Absolutely. You know, the concept that everything written down is a copy has been really foundational to everything I’ve written. I started off writing memoir, and so I was really confronting, in those books, the impossibility of writing an authentic account. It’s always a translation, because my life doesn’t happen in words on a page. It happens in life, and I can only translate it pretty loosely when I try to create a written account.
There’s this quote that gets attributed to Frank Zappa – I don’t know if he really said it – which is, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” You just can’t make those two things mean the same thing. The same is true of historical fiction, and writing about history. I wrote about Elizabeth Gaskell, and I would get letters from people who were upset that I missed a key historical detail – "the tide was not high on that particular day in 1848” – and it’s important to some readers that historical fiction cleaves to that degree of accuracy. But for me, that’s so far from the project. For me, I’m translating.
There is no way we can evoke real history as it was lived on the page. I can only translate an imaginative experience. My memoirs are not my life. Historical fiction is not real history. Writing about music is not music. And yet, all of these things are meaningful and precious to me. We can appreciate the value of something that is not the original. I think these acts of translation and copying are often earnest, beautiful things.
You teach creative writing at the University of Warwick. Do you lecture on historical fiction?
Yes, I was teaching a historical fiction class whilst writing this book, and it was probably my favourite teaching experience I’ve ever had. I loved that group. I put a lot of historical novels that I wanted to think about on the reading list, and it was like having a really great reading group devoted to talking about books that I love.
I have to ask – what was on the reading list? What were you reading while writing? It’s getting dark out, and I could use a new book.
Let me pull up the reading list. We read To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara, The New Life by Tom Crewe, How to Be Both by Ali Smith, my favourite novelist of all time, The Parisian by Isabella Hammad, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
I just re-listened to Wolf Hall on audiobook. It’s so, so good.
Well, Wolf Hall undermines all of those things I was saying earlier about translating historical fiction, because Hilary Mantel was clearly psychic.
Are there other historical novels you keep coming back to?
I don’t re-read many books, but I return to Sherlock Holmes quite often, and Middlemarch, which is everything to me that a book could possibly be. And I mean, it’s obvious to say Sarah Waters, but Fingersmith is just extravagantly brilliant. I try to take that book apart and see how it works. I haven’t got there yet. I feel dumbstruck by how clever it is. And I think because it’s such a gripping story and it’s so thrilling to read, you forget how incredibly well constructed it is.
Fingersmith is one of my favourite novels too, and it’s been mentioned often as a comparative title to The Original, which is also a queer Victorian suspense novel. Do you think it’s fair to say, as readers, that we’re especially drawn to queer historical fiction, because those narratives were typically missing from nineteenth-century novels?
Yes, and it’s wonderful to revisit those Victorian novels with a project like The Original. I get to work in this era that I feel connected and indebted to, to put some of my own experiences in, and to allow queerness to exist in the Victorian novel really overtly. That feels useful for me, as a writer. And queerness was quite important to my thinking about The Original, because it’s an inheritance novel, and one of the ways that the plots of these books are channelled is through the passage of money. But queerness really interrupts that, because without lineage, the idea of inheritance becomes tricky.
There is so much queer history that’s unseen. And I think because of my own experience of not really understanding myself as a queer person until I was in my thirties, even in an age with huge amounts of acceptance, I wonder how many queer people in history just didn’t realise that about themselves. Maybe there were queer people who didn’t know they were queer, and maybe they led lives that were cramped and constrained and not quite authentic, and they never really understood it, in the same way that I didn’t in my twenties. That thought is staggering to me.
It’s moving that we can look into the past and see these queer characters who probably felt very unseen, but were, you know, existing as plentifully as queer people do now. Fiction doing that – I find it very compelling and restorative.
Nell, I’ve forgotten to ask you how you start your day – you and I are supposed to be having video breakfast together. Are you a breakfast person?
If I’m looking after the children, then breakfast is probably whatever they haven’t eaten. But if they are not there, I will go all out, and breakfast is my favourite thing.
Excellent, what do you have?
So much coffee. Coffee is my favourite meal. I also love to eat a grapefruit, but really slowly. Like, really slowly.
A slow grapefruit, okay.
Yes, but that’s not all. Then you’ve got to have bagels. And eggs, probably scrambled, with some kind of vegetable in there. I love a multi-course breakfast. But normally, it’s half a piece of toast that the children have left. That’s good too.
Nell wears the TOAST Gathered Neck Mini Stripe Shirt and Wool Tweed Herringbone Coat.
The Original by Nell Stevens is available now.
Words by Jo Rodgers.
Photography by Aniella Weinberger.
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