Book of Spells, and an epistolary novel, Arky Types, written with Michelene Wandor, would appear in 1987. As a feminist writer, mother and vicar’s wife, she would both play up to and feel awkward about her “eccentric” image.76 In an autobiographical essay at the end of A Book of Spells, she describes being a writer and a mother:
This morning I was meant to be upstairs, drafting a short story. It is not their demandingness that keeps me from this sterner pleasure, but their loveliness. I have written before about how their dailiness and iron will for my attention balance and protect me against the dangerous voyages of the imagination—they ballast me safely with normality and connectedness, and ensure my return to sanity and to home. I have not written about the reverse: how the rigour and excitement and challenge of writing fiction weights me against their enchantment, against maternal romanticism and the isolated womb life in the garden.77
Maitland describes her life in the 1970s and 80s as an immensely happy time, “a marvelous life.”78 But at the end of the 1980s, this disintegrated: her marriage was ending, amidst the depressing contexts of Thatcherism and the increasing right-wing misogyny of Anglo-Catholicism. Thus in the early 1990s she underwent a period of profound life changes. Her theological interests, enriched by her interest in science, focused on “a huge, wild, dangerous God . . . a God of almost manic creativity, ingenuity and enthusiasm; a Big-Enough God”;79 a theme of her novels Three Times Table and Home Truths, and some of the short stories of Women Fly When Men Aren’t Watching. In 1993 she converted to Roman Catholicism: “there has been no doctrinal or liturgical change for me, merely a repositioning of my relationship to authority; a reaffirmation, despite its many sillinesses (and I must say wrongnesses) that a church can, and must, be universal, can be large scale through time and space—can indeed be big enough.”80
Maitland moved to a house in a small Northamptonshire village, in which she was “suddenly, and without exactly planning it, living on my own for the first time in my life.”81 Maitland found that she loved the solitude and silence, and wanted more of it. She associates the experience of change and a renewed sense of self with her age—not only the changing circumstances of a marriage ending and children leaving home—but also by the physiological “change” of the menopause. This is something that is little discussed in western culture, “terrified of the process of ageing, and in which women are encouraged to take artificial hormones so that they do not enter this magical condition.”82 Maitland’s collection of short stories written during this time, On Becoming a Fairy Godmother, retells old and invents new tales about menopausal women, “making unexpected changes in their lives, opening up their imaginations and finding a new self-sufficiency.”83
Maitland’s solitary lifestyle and increasing interest in silence meant that she became more attuned to the natural world: “I would go out into the garden at night or in the early morning and just look and listen: there were stars, weather, seasons, growth and repetition.”84 For the first time in her life she tended her own garden, finding sacramentality in its silent joy:
Gardening puts me in contact with all this silent energy; gardeners become active partners in all that silent growth. I do not make it happen, but I share in its happening. The earth works its way under my nails and into my fingerprints, and a gardener has to pay attention to the immediate now of things . . . In Warkton for the first time a garden became precious to me—it became an occupation, a resource and also my first glimpse that there might be art forms that I could practise that might not be made out of words.85
She became interested in “how gardens might reflect ideas, thoughts and desires, just as literature or painting does”86 and wrote a book about such gardens, along with the garden designer Peter Matthews, called Gardens of Illusion. Researching the book, she travelled around the UK, and, observing “the wild and desolate places that still . . . occupy a great deal of space in our supposedly overcrowded land,” such as the Pennines, the Lake District and the Highlands. In this she found that “it was not peace and contentment that I craved, but that awed response to certain phenomena of the ‘natural’ world . . . I discovered in myself a longing for the sublime, for an environment that, rather than soothing me, offered some raw, challenging demands in exchange for grandeur and ineffability.”87
Maitland became more interested in silence itself and contemplative prayer, and in 2000 decided to move to “the Huge Nothing of the high moorlands” of Weardale, in pursuit of “not just a greater quantity of silence, but also a more intense and focused experience of it.”88 Shortly after moving to the moors, she spent six weeks in isolation on the Isle of Skye: “[f]ascinated by silence, drawn joyfully into the void, I wanted to experience a total version.”89 Her commitment to silent living deepened, and her historical, literary, and theological research, as well as her own thought on the experience of silence, was published in 2008’s A Book of Silence. The book opens with Maitland “sitting on the front doorstep of my little house with a cup of coffee, looking down the valley at my extraordinary view of nothing,”90 feeling particularly satisfied because the previous day she had received the completion certificate for this house, that she had built on the moors of Galloway. On her website, she says, “[h]ere I write and pray and walk and am happy.”91
Maitland’s writing of her self is more prominent in non-fiction than in her novels or short stories; it is in Michèle Roberts’s fiction that I read a lot of fictionalizing of the author’s own life experience (hence this chapter’s section on Roberts is considerably longer than that on Maitland). However, one aspect of Maitland’s life that is employed in her novels and short stories is her voice hearing: from the 1980s onwards she experienced auditory hallucinations: voices which she knows are internal and “something to do with my imagination,” to which she gives descriptive names: “the Dwarf, the Angel, the Little Girl.”92 In A Book of Silence she writes, “I found the content of these voices more absorbing and engaging than tormenting, and they certainly never urged hideous actions upon me.”93 She does not believe in the existence of schizophrenia, thinking that “there must be something wrong, when people are unable to distinguish between Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper) and William Blake (who as a boy saw angels sitting in a tree on Peckham Rye, ‘bright wings bespangling every bough like stars’).”94 The voice of Angel is heard by characters in the novel Brittle Joys and in some of the stories of Angel and Me: Short Stories for Holy Week. The “collective voice I called the Godfathers and who seemed to represent a kind of internalised patriarchy”95 are put to direct use in Virgin Territory.
It is in another kind of voice that Maitland’s self is present in her fiction: her authorial voice, the writerly ‘I,’ is sometimes inserted into the story, particularly when she is engaging with the story of an other; for example “Triptych” in A Book of Spells or “Requiem” in Women Fly When Men Aren’t
