![]() ![]() ![]() It had been inspired by the deep anxiety I'd seen at work in the fiction of conservative 40s writers such as Angela Thirkell and Josephine Tey – an anxiety about a changing social system and a newly confident working class that amounted, at times, to a kind of hysteria. The novel was to be set in the 1940s, and was to have as its background changes in the British class system. But thinking back to that moment on a subsequent visit to the festival, in July 2006, I found myself musing on ghosts – and started to wonder whether a spot of the supernatural mightn't be just the thing to perk up my barely begun new novel. It was nothing to do with the (gorgeous) location I'd been plagued by the same bad dream for months. During a stay at the literary festival at Dartington Hall a few years ago, I woke with a shriek in the middle of the night, imagining I'd seen a spectral figure standing at the foot of the bed. A ppropriately enough for a gothic novel, The Little Stranger was born out of a nightmare. ![]()
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