Shortly after her blockbuster 2004 debut “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” – a Beamer 2005 selection – Susanna Clarke collapsed during dinner with friends, marking the beginning of a devastating health crisis. Diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, she suffered from migraines, exhaustion, light sensitivity, and brain fog so severe she sometimes couldn’t complete a single sentence. She stopped considering herself a writer and became bed-bound at times.
After a decade of struggle, Clarke gradually learned to manage her condition by working in 25-minute intervals. She made a triumphant return with “Piranesi” (2020), a novel about a man trapped in a labyrinth, which she later realized partly reflected her own experience of isolation.
Now, twenty years after her debut, Clarke has published “The Wood at Midwinter,” a 60-page illustrated work that returns to the magical world of her first novel. The story follows a mystical young woman who can communicate with animals and trees and disappears into the forest. While it reads like a simple children’s fable, it’s actually connected to her current novel-in-progress, set in contemporary Newcastle, which, in Clarke’s magical England, serves as the capital of the mysterious Raven King.
Despite ongoing health challenges, Clarke remains active, also working on an “anti-horror” novel set in the Industrial Revolution. She’s adapted to a new way of creating, summed up in her philosophy: “Write the way you can and not the way you think you’re supposed to.” During writing sessions, she holds stuffed versions of the animals that appear in her latest book – a pig and a fox – as talismans “to ward off, I don’t know what, something or other.”
Her original novel, “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” sold over 4 million copies and established Clarke as a major fantasy writer alongside Tolkien and Lewis. While she can’t match that book’s intensive decade-long research process now, she’s found new ways to access her “peculiar imagination” within the constraints of her health.
More by Alexandra Alter at the New York Times.