Tessa Hadley: ‘I feel I’ve got the novel’s rhythm now, and that’s exciting’

The author of The Past on women in writing, the secret of good dialogue and why there can be no fiction without friction

The author of five acclaimed novels and two collections of short stories, Hadley has been likened to Elizabeth Bowen and Alice Munro. Her sixth novel, The Past, is about a group of siblings who spend three long weeks at their grandparents old house, its memory-littered rooms conspiring to bring long-buried (and not-so-long-buried) tensions to the surface. Hadley, who did not publish her first novel until she was 46, teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.

Does a novel start with character rather than plot for you?
Yes, but not with individuals. It’s to do with shape. Let me show you a postcard: it’s a picture of a maquette by Barbara Hepworth [one of the artist’s “family groups”]. I saw it and I thought, that looks like a novel. So The Past came to me as a family gathering in a particular house, in a particular place. After that, the joy is in imagining: who are these people?

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