LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE MARCH-SEPTEMBER ISSUE | Page 50

Just bloody do it!” A three-month creative writing course run by Curtis
Brown, the literary agency, spurred her on (she was selected on the
strength of 3,000 words and a synopsis). As a Costa prize judge, she
knew how flawed first novels can be. But she now concludes that writers
are made as well as born: “I’m the product of everything I’ve read, every
conversation, every emotion I’ve felt. Inevitably, because I’ve just
turned 60, people will say, what took you so long? My novel needed to
be slow-cooked… because of what I didn’t know. The craft frightened
me.”
Working with 14 other trainee novelists, two hours a week, she was
initially unnerved by criticism. “I had thought if you altered anything,
the whole edifice was so fragile it would crumble.” The class
workshopped each other’s novels. She saw – still sees – fiction as
visceral: “I felt a terrible mixture of vain and terrified, which is the thing
that stopped me doing anything at all. This sounds really twee but it was
so important, it mattered so much.”
She was drawn to the 18th century because of the “look of it. I walk a
lot. I love seeing the layers under London. I wanted to communicate that
history is just us, not a special way of thinking.Although, as a girl in that
period you were limited in your sphere of influence and your
communications. I did some research, read 18th-century letters and
diaries…” Her challenge was to create a 19-year-old heroine who did
not sound too knowing. When you’re 13, she says, you “feel something
is bursting out of you but you don’t know what it is”. The sense of
sexuality is a powder keg in the book but she writes so well she’s in no
danger of winning the Bad Sex award: “It’s the thing I agonised about
most.”
Curtis Brown doesn’t automatically represent its graduates. Yet Gordon
Wise, on the strength of 3,000 words, inquired of Ellis last summer:
“When could you finish this?” By November, she had delivered 85,000
words. Getting the email from Wise – “Read it. Loved it.” – was the

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