Sarah Waters is a lesbian book-lover’s dream; not only is she a hell of a writer but she’s as out as a person can be. As a result we have five books which, had she been a lesser writer and just a lezzer writer, would be in our library but not the mainstream. With Sarah, lesbian culture is brought to the wider world.

She has, with Emma Donoghue, shown the straight world that lesbians existed in history, that our stories are just as fascinating, just as rich as theirs. Her writing is just too good to stay on the margins.

At the moment Sarah Waters is on a crazy world-wide publicity tour. She’s flying from city to city, taxiing from hotel to hotel to try to do as many interviews as possible. Everyone wants to meet her and she’s just too nice to say no. Annie Aura met her in a Dublin hotel and asked her some pertinent questions.

The Little Stranger is about Dr Faraday, a country doctor in middle England of the 1940s. As the book begins, he remembers as a child being brought by his mother into the local ‘big house’, Hundreds Hall, were she works among the dozens of maids. He is bewitched by the splendour of the place, the moulded crevices, luxurious furniture, long hallways. It’s a million miles away from the home he shares with his lower-class parents, parents who work their fingers to the bone to get him educated.

Years later, our narrator is initially excited to be called to the Hall to see to their solitary maid who is ill. When he drives up the long driveway, it’s clear that things have changed. Just as Faraday has risen in the ranks of society, Hundreds has fallen into disrepair.

Faraday gradually becomes a friend of the family, an odd bunch of characters made up of Rod and Caroline Ayres and their mother. This trio have been holed up in their crumbling mansion for years, desperately trying to hold back the imminent erosion.

As Faraday becomes a part of the family, he realises that all is not well. He may have arrived to cure the maid, but he ends up treating Rod and slowly realising that the house itself is sick. A sort of cancer has infected it and it’s determined to spread its disease to its inhabitants.

There has been a lot said about the fact that there are no lesbians in it, but I disagree. If you read Dr Faraday as a woman, it’s lezbalicious. His/Her relationship with Caroline is gay if you ask me, as Waters has used all of the old code words in describing her. She is ‘handsome’, ‘slightly masculine’, doesn’t wear make-up or shave her legs. Hello?

The Little Stranger is, at its most basic, a ghost story. But, this being Waters, there is much more going on. There are layers and layers of meaning. Hundreds Hall represents the end of the gentry class in post-war England. As it erodes, the social divisions become blurred – maids who lived in slums are now buying houses on the grounds which have been developed into housing estates.

The Ayreses have no idea how to live in this world. They hold onto the final strands of the old life, all the while wishing they could just live. Hundreds Hall is killing them with its financial demands, and the social shame of its disrepair is suffocating. Caroline, particularly, wants out. She is tired of watching the house kill her brother and is terrified of the same things happening to her.

Annie Aura put this to Sarah.

AA: In each of your books there is a recurring theme of characters being trapped in some fashion, wanting to get out of their current situation. In The Little Stranger, Dr. Faraday wants to get into Hundreds Hall and Caroline wants to get out.

SW: *laughs* I get asked about this quite a lot because they are often sort of prisons, you know, either real metaphorical prisons or…and I don’t really know why. I think it’s simply that it’s more interesting, it’s an interesting thing to write about.

People are trapped and there’s that kind of conflict, it makes for a more interesting story. I suppose because I’m interested in other sorts of prisons like gender and sexuality and class and, you know, how they confine people so maybe it’s something like that.

The Little Stranger is a great read. It’s much breezier than its predecessor, The Night Watch which was quite ponderous and melancholy. However, one thing you are always guaranteed with a Sarah Waters book is a great story. She has the natural gift of a fireside seanchaí, slowly drawing you into her world and seducing you with her story. Her attention to the details; social, sexual, and physical make every story believeable. Even a ghost story.

AA: Your style of period story-telling is characterised by meticulously faithful attention to detail in the universe you create for your characters. How long does it take you to familiarise yourself as an author with the vernacular, the environment and mundanities of the time and places in which your characters live? And what is your process for doing so?

SW: For this book and the one before it, because they were both set in the 40s I read a lot of 40s fiction, watched a lot of 40s films and read diaries from the period. That was a really great way of getting into the idiom of the period. To be honest, research is an ongoing process for me.

AA: In your second novel, Affinity, a supernatural thread ran through the story. It’s a theme which you have returned to in The Little Stranger. Have ghost stories or tales of the supernatural held a particular fascination for you?

SW: Yeah, they have, always. Even when I was a child I read a lot of ghost and horror stories. To be honest I’m pretty skeptical about the supernatural. I think on the whole it’s wishful or something on people’s parts.

I’m interested in the hold it has over us and I like the idea that there’s another world that maybe occasionally kind of leaks into our world. I really enjoyed writing a proper haunted house novel with this book and I’d like to write more ghost stories in the future.

So what does the future hold for our dream writer?

AA: Have you already thought about your next project or are you just enjoying time off from writing?
SW: I have a couple of ideas but I haven’t really worked on them yet as it’s very hard to do when you are travelling and doing interviews and talks. So at the moment, I’m not really thinking about that.

As for the future of the book, The Little Stranger, you an bet your bottom euro that it’ll be developed for the screen. It’s begging for it, with dark corners, mysterious ailments and a bewildered protagonist. Waters’ previous work has proven popular with TV audiences, not just for the hot lesbian action which thrilled us and disgusted The Mirror in equal measure.

AA: Of all the dramatised versions of your novels, which one most accurately reflects the book as you intended it?

SW: Interesting question! *looks away and ponders* Fingersmith, yeah, without a doubt. *smiles*

No argument here. It’ll be interesting to see what they can do with The Little Stranger. Here’s hoping they make Dr Faraday female. Look, I can dream

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