Rose Rivers (Double Jay) is published on May 17
the most terrible thing.”
Contrary to the accepted view, Wilson also thinks girls today have it tougher than ever. “Teenage girls today are expected to get 10 out of 10 for everything now; to be feisty and to stand up for themselves.
“They’re so sophisticated and seem to know everything, yet they’re inexperienced and have probably led a protected life. The way they look and have to get likes on social media has all become so much more important than it used to be”.
Not only does social media create a “perpetual record” but “so few 18 and 19 year olds seem to have gone through a spotty stage. They’re all pretty, with long, blonde, straight hair. I realise how much effort that must take.”
Children still send her letters, confiding in her that they’re bullied at school “for something like having an odd surname or ginger hair.” And while she agrees that some “young people are much more accepting about issues of ethnicity and sexuality, you still can’t eradicate this behaviour, even in schools with anti-bullying policies”.
Girls wearing trousers or boys wearing skirts to school represents “a huge step forward” but she stalls at gender-neutral toilets. “Boys and girls divide sharply. As a teenage girl I certainly would have preferred a bit of privacy,” she adds, breaking into a girlish giggle.
Since she wrote Kiss in 2007, about a girl whose (platonic) boyfriend comes out, sexual attitudes have transformed. “Life has changed completely and you have to reflect that in your writing. If I were writing it now, the girl would be more clued up and the boy wouldn’t find it so difficult. The difficult thing is when you’ve written a book, it stays.”
She’s ambivalent about the transgender issue. “For some children it’s their biggest thing, others sense their parents would have problems if they were gay so it’s a way out. Then there are kids who might feel it’s cool to be different.”
Tracy Beaker returns later this year as a 30-year-old single mother with a nine-year-old daughter, while Rose Rivers is published this month. It’s the latest in her Hetty Feather series about a rich 13-year-old girl kicking against the constraints of prim Victorian society.
Wilson says she feels so out of touch with modern teenagers “because of social media and other pressures” that she has given up writing about them and retreated into the safety of the Vic-
❝ I support various charities ... eventually I will leave my inheritance to my daughter Emma
torian era, since “with all these turbulent emotions I want to show that girls have always felt the same way”.
No doubt she has also calculated that she’s less likely to be accused of double standards. “If protective, middle-class parents look at this book, they’re not going to mind as much if a Victorian child is treated badly. I can be as dramatic as I want.”
A fan of Victorian literature with a legendarily large library, Wilson recently downsized to East Sussex. Does she live with anyone? “I do but I’m not going to go into that. It’s private,” comes her reply. And her legacy? Her wealth was put at £40m by the Sunday Times in its 2016 Rich List, when she appeared as the 13th richest author, level with Lee Child.
“I support various charities; eventually I will leave it to my daughter.” Wilson was married at 19 to a police sergeant but divorced in 2004.
Her daughter, Emma, is a Cambridge Professor of French Literature, born when Wilson was 21. “The money might have gone if I live on and on.”