FACTS AND FICTION

As with all her books, serious research has gone into Harriet Evans’ latest novel. The hugely successful fiction writer discusses bees, Bridget Jones and how attitudes in the industry need to change

It doesn’t take Harriet Evans long to answer the question: what makes a great book? “It’s that when you open the pages, the author has created a world that you’re in and you don’t ever feel it slip away,” she says. And Evans should know. To date, she has published 13 books, all of them bestsellers. First lines include: “The day Martha Winter decided to tear her family apart began like any other day.” She is a deft hand at the elevator pitch, and gets frustrated at those who dismiss them (“Everyone can sum up their book… Even A Tale of Two Cities. It was the best of times, the worst of times; it’s the French Revolution. Get over yourself”). She bills her new novel, The Beloved Girls, as “Daphne du Maurier meets The Wicker Man, with bees”. Evans might be a master of commercial fiction but finds today’s publishing categories tricky. Growing up, her father was an editor at Hodder & Stoughton, as well as an author of thrillers, and her mother became editorial director at Transworld – working with Jilly Cooper, Joanna Trollope and Sophie Kinsella. Their house was filled with books. Was popular fiction prevalent? “That’s too reductive,” she says. “There were Penguin Classics everywhere and what would you say Dickens is? Or Conrad? What would you say Evelyn Waugh is?” The London Library’s fiction section provides a case in point. “When you walk through, there are hilarious books by the most popular novelists of the day when the Library opened. And you could say, is that necessarily reflected in all the books being acquired for the Library today? I’d say maybe not so much.” In 1996, having passed up on early aspirations to be an actress in musicals, and following a short stint at The Lady magazine, Evans joined the publishing world herself. She started out as a secretary at Heinemann, then months later joined Penguin and rose up the ranks as an editor, working with, among others, Sue Townsend on Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years. “Sue massively changed my way of thinking about everything,” Evans says. “She’s basically a communist but read The Daily Telegraph because the foreign reporting and the sports coverage was really good, and she said if you just read The Guardian when you’re left wing, you’re not being challenged. Don’t you agree we would all be in a much better place if people did that?” Hugely influential, too, was Marian Keyes, who Evans worked with as a junior editor and who was writing “some of the best, most devastating books I’d ever read”, though she was labelled “chick lit… or a bit silly”. Evans says that in its true form, chick lit is “really great and refreshing” – particularly for a young woman starting out in London in the 90s and, “for the first time, reading books where people went and got curries with their friends on a Friday night,

The Beloved Girls: photo courtesy of Headline

drank too much, had fun, were looking for love, working in a really exciting environment, not that sure about how their lives would pan out.”

Evans made her own first move into writing during what she describes as the “boom and bust” era of this genre. “Every journalist and society ‘It’ girl would be thinking, ‘I’ve seen Helen Fielding do it, I can do it,’ and not appreciate that Bridget Jones is an English comic classic.” Many submissions she received were “great”, but others weren’t, and one particularly bad work sold for a lot of money. Airing her opinion to her sales director at Penguin, she was told to give it a go herself and she hasn’t looked back.

First writing books in her spare time before work, she decided to leave her second publishing job, at Hachette, in 2009. Though she admires “really sharp romcoms”, she feels that her skills lie elsewhere. Hugh Grant’s job in Four Weddings and a Funeral “is irrelevant because it’s this really tight [work], but I’m always interested in the stories that have gone before… of a bit more of the archaeological layers.”

At the heart of this has been The London Library, to which she was introduced by her husband, Chris, who worked in finance at the time and would visit in his lunch hour. It became a haven for research. Today, it is her “absolute favourite place in the world”, the only reason she worried about leaving London for Bath in 2019, and somewhere where, upon returning in July, she cried. Writing The Butterfly Summer, which features a forgotten house on a creek in remote Cornwall, she was in “the science and nature part of the Library until

as late as I possibly could be looking up all these really random Victorian books on Lepidoptera”. For a book she is currently working on about a family moving to Hampstead in the 1960s, Peter Cook’s biography proved fertile. “I read the whole thing, which is super depressing,” she says. “Don’t ever be a big star at the age of 22 because your life will just be crap afterwards. But the setting; what was happening to British media then; what people were wearing, what their house looked like… it just sparks all these ideas.” A previous evocation of this period in her third novel, Love Always, caught the eye of The Independent in 2011: “It’s the 60s section of the novel, as related in [heroine] Cecily’s teen diary, that marks Evans out as a writer of top-drawer popular fiction. This sunny coming-of-age drama darkens at every turn...” Evans has a special notebook in which she creates floor plans for her novels, and she says, “geekiness is the greatest gift of all.” With The Beloved Girls, it has allowed her to write with great confidence about bees – “Honey bees freak me out, but God they are so fascinating” – and integrate them into a story about a family ritual stretching back hundreds of years. As she says, “[mine] may be books that are sold in supermarkets, but they need to be really fricking good. And that’s for me to work out so that you only see the readable plot side, not the research that went into it.” She studied art history at A level and “loved what it taught me in terms of how you look [at things]”, but has also always had a fondness for what grips in a narrative. “One of my favourite possessions when I was around 13 was a magazine called Britain’s Lost Treasures – it was the palaces, the crowns, the missing plays, the rings... all this stuff that’s existed, but we’ve lost and no one knows where it is.”

Evans feels that prosaic elements of her fiction are also key, with her pandemic life filled with “a tedious cycle of WhatsApp groups about play dates. To be able to laugh about it with people in the same boat has been really helpful, but to be able to read about it has been helpful, too. I had an editor about two books ago – a really, really good editor – and she took out some of the domestic detail. It wasn’t a book about domestic drudgery per se, and normally I love being edited, but I said, ‘The school-mum-gate stuff is the bit that people will respond to.’” Less than the label of women’s fiction itself, she takes issue with the fact that “really good books by women about women’s lives aren’t taken seriously. No single piece of what’s called commercial women’s fiction is regularly reviewed in a broadsheet. I find it interesting the way that I, who have been a Richard and Judy top-10 bestseller and won prizes, am treated compared with someone who’s written a thriller about a criminal mastermind who makes a dressing gown out of women’s bodies. You’re like, ‘Sure, that should be at a literary festival.’” Evans thinks that the conversation has moved forward, but not enough. Nevertheless, she’ll continue to write work that grips, and that also evokes lived experiences and serves as a reminder of the power of commercial fiction, whoever is writing it. All that matters, she says, is that she’s written a “really great book that will stand the test of time. If it’s good, then there’s some peace in that.” •

The Beloved Girls is out now, published by Headline

All images of Harriet Evans in The London Library by Hanna Gabler