Q: In The Three Graces , your latest novel about three expats in their 80s forging new lives in Chiantishire, you once again return to Tuscany, as in Foreign Bodies and Love in Idleness . What draws you to explore Tuscany beyond the typical tourist lens and, more broadly, why is creating a strong sense of place so important in your work? Q: Your novels often weave in references to other literary works. The Golden Rule reimagines Strangers on a Train with nods to fairytales like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast , and Love in Idleness draws inspiration from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Did any particular fairytales, mythologies, or literary works influence The Three Graces ? Q: Over your career you've written nine interconnected novels. Can you elaborate on your process of world building and why you choose to create a shared universe? Q: How do books contribute to and change your experience of a destination? Q: Which three books have had the greatest influence on your writing, and why have they had such a lasting impact? Great Expectations Anna Karenina Cold Comfort Farm Why do book collections matter? Book a consultation with a ~personal curator Contact Quick Links Follow us @ultimatelibrary Join our community
Amanda Craig on Tuscany and Her Latest Novel The Three Graces
28 Oct 2024
© Charlie Hopkinson
British novelist, journalist, and literary critic Amanda Craig has been compared to greats like Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, celebrated for her satiric wit and keen observations of contemporary society. Since her debut in 1990 with
Foreign Bodies
—the first in a series of eight interconnected state-of-the-nation novels—Craig has been hailed as a master of her craft. Her seventh novel,
Hearts and Minds
, was longlisted for the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction, and
The Golden Rule
earned a spot on the 2021 Women's Prize longlist.
~~In our latest interview in this
series
with leading authors on reading and sense of place, we had the pleasure of speaking with Amanda Craig about the inspiration behind her latest novel,
The Three Graces
, a social comedy set in Tuscany that centres on three elderly heroines. In our conversation, Amanda also explores how reading fiction while travelling can reveal a nuanced perspective of a destination and shares three books that have shaped her writing.
Why Tuscany, you ask? I’ve long been aware of Tuscany's significance in English literature, from Shakespeare to Dickens, Trollope, EM Forster, and Daphne du Maurier. While writing my first novel, I was reacting to the Forsterian view that it was all bucolic bliss and somehow naive Italians set in motion the Renaissance before sinking back into a childlike daze.
~Having grown up in Italy (my parents worked for the UN in Rome), I often heard expats echo these views, which I found patronising and absurd. Italy endured great suffering through many wars, both its own civil wars before unification and invasions by France and Germany over many centuries. What Forster perceived as simplicity was actually the result of a deeply wounded people. It’s taken me years to address this in my writing, and only
The Three Graces
begins to explore these issues. But I always strive to see Italians as real people, not caricatures.~
I love Tuscany for its staggering beauty, both natural and cultural, but it’s also a harsh, sometimes dangerous place—rife with threats Britons might find unfamiliar, like snakes, scorpions, earthquakes, and even the Mafia. All of which makes it incredibly compelling for a novelist. To me, places are characters. I created Santorno— the setting for
The Three Graces
— as an amalgam of Tuscan hill towns, allowing me to play with familiar elements without being tied to one location (and to avoid any cross letters from tourists pointing out inaccuracies)!~
I love myths and fairytales. Many years ago I was struck by how many of these stories, from Greek to Norse, feature three women as powerful and mysterious forces. Sometimes, as in Botticelli’s Primavera, they are young and beautiful, sometimes old and ugly. I became increasingly interested in the latter especially as the developed world has moved to a gerontocracy - the Boomers, so-called, have all the money & power and the young the opposite. ~~So that was something I knew I wanted to write about. I know many people my age whose parents suffer from what I call “the Lear fear” of passing on accumulated wealth, and others who have transformed the lives of the next generation - and still more who have nothing at all to inherit. It worries me very much. The growing inequalities I’ve seen since my childhood are one of the reasons why I became a State of the Nation novelist. ~
I arrived at this idea through so many routes - I discovered Balzac's
La Comédie humaine
on a beach in Thailand at 25, and was electrified, and then also Trollope’s novels. But in fact, Joan Aiken’s
Wolves of Willoughby Chase
sequence primed my imagination as a child. Why wouldn’t you create an interconnected universe? That’s the fun part. Writing is sheer drudgery.~
Right now I’m in Cephalonia, which
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
made famous but I’m also thinking a lot about
The Odyssey
because I’m looking at Ithaca and wondering how the greatest hero of all time came from such a small rocky island! If you’re a reader, literature gives you so many lenses to see a place, both “good” and “bad”. I tend not to like most travel writing though. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, and a lot of travel writing strikes me as the opposite.
There are so many books that have influenced me and their significance changes according to what I’m writing. If I had to pick three then
Great Expectations
,
Anna Karenina
and
Cold Comfort Farm
. I believe a novel should not just be about the internal world but the external too. To read too much literary fiction, you’d think nothing but falling in love mattered. Whereas the truth is that, transformative though love can be, this is a fraction of the important ( and seemingly trivial) events in a life. The novel I’m writing now is essentially a thriller taking place over eight hours in a dull little street of shops in which people have to make life or death decisions about each other…which in most cases doesn’t involve romantic feelings. I also prefer the laughter of sanity -something
Cold Comfort
helped me find.
BY Charles dickens
As Peter Ackroyd once said, "His novels will endure as long as the language itself." In Dickens' later novel, Pip's life is forever changed by a series of events: an encounter with an escaped convict, a summons to the decaying home of Miss Havisham, and the unexpected generosity of a mysterious benefactor. Join him as he discovers the true nature of his "great expectations".
by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina seems to lead a perfect life, with beauty, wealth, and a cherished son. However, when she crosses paths with the fiery Count Vronsky, everything changes. Their passionate affair ignites scandal, tearing apart her family and unleashing a storm of jealousy and resentment.
BY Stella Gibbons
Set in 1930s rural Britain,
Cold Comfort Farm
offers a sharp and humorous look at country life. After being orphaned, city-raised Flora Poste moves in with her eccentric relatives, the Starkadders. Surrounded by their dramatic emotions, despair, and plotting, Flora quickly takes charge, determined to bring some much-needed order to the chaos.
Thank you to Amanda Craig for discussing her work with us. For more on Craig's novels, visit her
website.
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