Here she is, Jessie Burton, at the door of what she describes as her “burrow” in Forest Hill, south-east London. First glimpse of her flat: colourful, perky, tidy. “Come in,” she says. She shows me what she calls her “she shed” – a literary wendy house at the end of the garden – built on the proceeds of her first novel The Miniaturist and in which she has finished her second, The Muse, which is out this week. Jessie matches these upbeat surroundings. Dark, vivid and forthcoming, she wears a skirt that is just asking to be twirled and has a musical, ever-so-slightly panicky laugh. She looks Spanish but is not – she grew up in Wimbledon. If you did not know otherwise (as I already do), you would say this was someone who would never let anything get out of hand. But life has a way of testing even the most flourishing individuals and, in Jessie’s case, the challenge came wrapped up in success.
The Miniaturist, set in 17th-century Amsterdam and inspired by Petronella Oortman’s doll’s house in the Rijksmuseum, was a bestseller published in 34 countries – nothing miniature about its success. To promote the book, Jessie did “over 200 events” (she has had reason to count them) in 18 months. She wrote: “It was the fullest, most confusing and amazing time of my life. Over a million people bought my first novel, the TV rights were optioned, Martin Scorsese put it on to his Kindle, a Spice Girl tweeted about loving it, Vogue asked me to pose for a portrait.” She was delighted, naturally – but what no one, including Jessie herself, could have predicted was that, at 31, and during this period when she was expected to feel exultantly invincible, she would break down. She knows full well that daring to confess that success was an ordeal is unlikely to secure her many sympathy votes but she has none the less written about this period in a brave and fascinating blogpost .
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