Nannies are in the ideal position when it comes to novels. They get to live in the houses of the rich and famous and yet often come from quite lowly backgrounds but are not servants.
Stacey Halls’ first book, The Familiars, earned her the title of bestselling debut novel of 2019. Now, as she publishes her third book, this time set in Yorkshire, she is also appearing at the Bradford Literature Festival. Catherine Scott talks to her.
Stacey Halls never really set out to be an author. Her first love was journalism and she always wanted to work for magazines. And so after leaving university she got a job at The Bookseller magazine – the British publishing industry’s trade magazine. It was here that she met scores of authors and realised that writing books was something that she could actually do herself. “I’d always been a bookworm as a child with my head constantly in a book,” say the Lancashire-born 33-year-old. “But it wasn’t until I worked for The Bookseller, which I loved and where I met lots of authors, that I realised they weren’t actually demi-gods –they were ordinary people like me. It also gave me insight into how the publishing industry works.”
But while understanding what is a very competitive business is a start, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will immediately become a published author.
“I knew that there were 300,000 books published every year and so to become one of those is really very hard,” says Halls.
In fact her first book, a contemporary novel about families, was rejected by every agent that she sent it to. “I was very young and I was trying to be a bit more literary than I am now,” she admits.
“I wasn’t disheartened by the rejections but I knew that if I had a second book rejected, then that was likely to be the end of my aspirations to become an author and so I had to take it very seriously.”
Halls took a two-month sabbatical from her job and set about writing The Familiars which was accepted by one of the agents who had originally rejected her.
“I’m from Lancashire and was familiar with the Pendle Witches. We used to visit Gawthorpe Hall and you can see Pendle Hill from there and it always made me think about the witches. Taking the time off from work gave me time to do more research and to come up with a plan of how I was going to write it. I made sure I’d finished the whole book before sending it off to agents.”
But nothing prepared Halls for the success of her first novel. The Familiars was the bestselling debut hardback novel of 2019, won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards’ Debut Book of the Year.
“I was so glad that I had already started writing my second novel or I think the success of the
The Familiars would have paralysed me. I was completely unprepared for how it ended up taking off,” she says.
Her second novel, The Foundling, was also a Sunday Times bestseller and another work of historical fiction.
“I am fascinated by the relationship between the upper and the lower classes and the idea of service and also of nannies. Nannies are in the ideal position when it comes to novels. They get to live in the houses of the rich and famous and yet often come from quite lowly backgrounds. They often get to see the world and are taken into the family and yet are not members of the family and neither are they servants.”
It is this idea that Halls explores in her third novel, Mrs England, which she will talk about in Writing Yorkshire at the Bradford Literature Festival next month.
Mrs England is set in West Yorkshire in 1904 and explores the relationship between Norland Nanny Ruby and her employer’s, mill owner Charles England and his wife Lilian, set against the menacing landscape.
“I’m a huge fan of Hebden Bridge and now I live down South we often holiday near there,” says Halls. “I really wanted to write a book set in the Hardcastle Crags area just outside Hebden Bridge. It feels like such a magical place where the world just melts away.”
While writing Mrs England, Halls spent a lot of time researching the Norland Nanny academy in London. “I have always found them fascinating and really enjoyed looking at their archives and seeing letters from their nannies posted from all over the world.”
The novel also looks at the subject of coercive control. “It is an area I became interested in when the law recognised coercive control in 2015 as a form of domestic abuse. It’s the very dark art of domestic abuse – emotional manipulation and financial control,” says Halls.
“I wanted to explore that in a historical setting when clearly it existed but no one even acknowledged it was a thing. I wanted to show a character who was clearly being controlled but it wasn’t clear who she was being controlled by.”
Halls is currently writing her fourth novel, a Victorian drama set in Shepherd’s Bush. “I love the Victorian period, it is so close in many ways. My grandparents will have been around in Victorian times and that fascinates me. It was also a time of massive change.”
Halls is looking forward to appearing at the Bradford Literature Festival where she is taking part in two separate events on July 2 – one about how Yorkshire’s green and pleasant lands inspired her new novel, Mrs England, and the second on writing about witchcraft.
The evening before she will be appearing in conversation in the Wildman Theatre at Ilkley Playhouse. The special Grove Book Shop author event starts at 7.30pm (www.grovebookshop. com/event).
After two years of hybrid and digital events, the Bradford Literature Festival is back.
Running from Friday until July 3, the north of England’s leading literature festival will feature more than 450 events for adults and children across 10 days, encompassing the best of literature, theatre, cultural discussions, film screenings, professional workshops and historical tours, marrying the popular with the intellectual, the widely read with the innovative, while chasing down obscurities and shedding new light on the familiar.
There will also be discussions on the challenges of today, from what we do about Russia to the energy crisis, from the rise of the far right in politics to the future of television.
Authors include footballer John Barnes, comedian and writer Dom Joly, cook and television presenter Delia Smith and Ed Balls and Alastair Campbell.
■ www.bradfordlitfest.co.uk