Susanna Clarke Wrote a Hit Novel Set in a Magical Realm. Then She Disappeared.

Twenty years ago, an editor at Bloomsbury took a big chance on a very unusual book.

A debut fantasy novel set in 19th-century England, it told the story of two feuding magicians trying to revive the lost art of English magic. The unfinished manuscript was littered with elaborate footnotes that, in some cases, read like an academic treatise on the history and theory of magic. Its author, Susanna Clarke, was a cookbook editor who wrote fiction in her spare time.

The book, “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,” instantly launched Clarke as one of the greatest fantasy writers of her generation. Critics placed her in the pantheon alongside C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien; some compared her sly wit and keen social observations to those of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. Readers devoured the novel, which went on to sell more than four million copies.

“I had never read anything like it in my life,” said Alexandra Pringle, the former editor in chief of Bloomsbury, which commissioned a first print run of 250,000 copies. “The way that she created that world, a world apart from our world but absolutely rooted in it, was so utterly convincing and drawn with such precision and delicacy.”

The novel reshaped the fantasy landscape and blurred the boundaries with literary fiction, making the Booker Prize long list and winning a Hugo Award, a major science fiction and fantasy prize. Clarke went on tour across the United States and Europe, and Bloomsbury later gave her a hefty contract for a second novel.

Then, almost as suddenly as she appeared, Clarke disappeared.

Not long after the novel’s release, Clarke and her husband were having dinner with friends near their home in Derbyshire, England. In the middle of the meal, she felt nauseated and wobbly, got up from the table, and collapsed.

In the years that followed, she struggled to write. Her symptoms — migraines, exhaustion, sensitivity to light and fogginess — made working for sustained periods impossible. She wrote scattered fragments that never cohered; sometimes she couldn’t finish a single sentence. At a low point, she was bed-bound and mired in depression.

Clarke stopped thinking of herself as a writer.

“It became a problem of just not believing that I could write anymore. I just didn’t think it was possible,” said Clarke, who was later diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. “I just thought of myself as this ill woman.”

Now, two decades after her groundbreaking debut, Clarke is returning to the magical world of Strange and Norell.

Her latest work, “The Wood at Midwinter,” which Bloomsbury published this month, centers on a mystical young woman who can speak to animals and trees and disappears into the forest. Spanning just 60 illustrated pages, the book feels spare and deceptively simple, almost like a children’s fable. But it’s also a glimpse into a richly imagined fantasy world that Clarke hasn’t stopped thinking about since she wrote “Strange and Norrell.”

The story Clarke tells in “The Wood at Midwinter” is a strand from her new novel-in-progress, which takes place in contemporary Newcastle. In Clarke’s fantastical version of England, Newcastle serves as the capital of the Raven King, a powerful and mysterious magician who Clarke described as “part of my subconscious.”

She was reluctant to say much more about the novel she’s working on, wary of raising expectations.

“Whether I can make good on all of these implied promises, I have no idea,” she said. “The biggest thing I battle with is, how much energy am I going to have to write today.”

Clarke writes the way a magpie collects sparkly objects. Images and scenes arrive, unbidden, and Clarke writes down the fragments, and later pieces them together into a narrative, or several.

“She’s always writing a dozen books in her head,” said Clarke’s husband, the science fiction and fantasy writer Colin Greenland.

Reading her fiction often feels like seeing a sliver of a much larger world. Even Clarke is sometimes unsure which stories she’s written down and which exist only in her imagination.

“I don’t remember what I put in ‘Strange and Norrell’ and what I didn’t,” Clarke said, sounding puzzled. “I like stories which feel like the back of another story, like beyond this story, there’s a different story, and we’re just seeing glimpses of that story,” she said. “In a way, ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell’ is the back of another story, but I wouldn’t say I know exactly what that other story is.”

Clarke, who is 64 and has a short, silvery-white bob, was sitting in the living room of her snug limestone cottage, where she and Greenland have lived for close to 20 years.

Their home sits on the main stretch of a tiny village in Derbyshire’s Peak District, just a few paces from a small stone chapel where Clarke delivers sermons once or twice a year, and a short walk from the dog-friendly village pub they visit occasionally. The quiet of the countryside, where on a recent fall day the silence was punctuated only by bird calls and the occasional bleating sheep, helps Clarke channel any energy she can muster into writing.

On a gray, slightly damp day in September, Clarke was feeling reasonably well, and had her feet up on a brown leather sofa, the spot where she writes most mornings.

In her lap she held a stuffed pig, with a stuffed fox nestled beside her; both creatures play a role in “The Wood at Midwinter.” She likes to hold her stuffed animals when she’s working, to help her think, and as a talisman “to ward off, I don’t know what, something or other.”

“Some people do things as a child, and then when they grow up, they put off childish things,” she said. “I’m not very good at that.”

Glancing down at the pig, she added, “I don’t really see the point of growing up.”

Clarke was born in Nottingham in 1959, and had an itinerant childhood. Her father, a Methodist minister, changed congregations every few years, so her family bounced around Northern England and Scotland. In their Protestant household, displays of emotion were discouraged; Clarke, the eldest of three, was brought up to believe that piety meant “you’re not supposed to do anything which makes yourself remarkable,” she said.

She found an emotional outlet in fiction, especially the fantasy novels of Lewis and Tolkien.

“In fantasy, there was ecstasy and terror and fear and loathing and love,” she said.

Clarke went on to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, where she was an indifferent student who preferred reading novels to studying. Later, she moved to London to work in publishing. She wrote fiction on the side, including a detective novel that she never finished.

Frustrated by her lack of progress, she tried, and failed, to quit writing.

“I thought, this is hopeless, I can’t write a book, and I can’t not write a book,” she said.

Clarke was living in London in the 1980s when an image came to her, almost like a waking dream. She saw a grieving man dressed in period clothes on a street in a city that resembled Venice, and it occurred to her that he had suffered a terrible loss after an attempt to conjure magic had gone wrong. For years, the image stayed with her.

In the early 1990s, when Clarke was teaching English in Bilbao, Spain, she found herself rereading Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” and realized that she should write fantasy, a genre that had captivated her since childhood. When she later began writing a tale about two rival magicians, she recalled the image of the man in Venice, who became the charming, irrepressible magician Jonathan Strange.

Feeling that her “writing roots” were in England, she decided to move back home. Over the next several years, Clarke worked as an editor of cooking and lifestyle books in Cambridge, and wrote her novel in the early mornings. She invented an alternate historical timeline, in which English magic had its heyday during the reign of the Raven King, a human raised by fairies who ruled for hundreds of years, then disappeared, cutting off the source of magic. She wove in folklore about fairies, sprinkled in historical figures like the Duke of Wellington, the poet Lord Byron and King George III, and infused real historical events like the Battle of Waterloo with supernatural elements.

Clarke kept falling down research rabbit holes, steeping herself in the minutiae of 19th-century British military history, social mores, cuisine, etiquette and fashion. It took her a decade to finish the novel, which at one point grew to more than 1,000 pages. She eventually found a literary agent and sent out the manuscript, but figured there would be a limited audience for it.

“What I do is so peculiar and a product of my rather peculiar imagination,” she said. “I thought, nobody else is going to be interested in this other than me.”

To Clarke’s surprise, Bloomsbury made a robust offer to publish it, footnotes and all, based on a partial submission of the manuscript.

It was an overnight blockbuster.

“It towers over everything else in the fantasy tradition that’s been written in this century,” said the fantasy novelist Lev Grossman, a self-avowed “colossal fan” of Clarke’s. “It’s rare that you read a book and you see a genre evolve right in front of you.”

Clarke, who is deeply private and found the experience of sudden fame “very, very peculiar,” planned to write a sequel once things quieted down. But not long after her book tour, she collapsed, and never quite recovered. Over the next decade, she lost faith in her ability to write at all.

“You’ve got the years when you haven’t written kind of weighing on you,” she said.

Over time, Clarke slowly found her way back to writing. She learned to manage her symptoms, and discovered she could stay on track by working in 25-minute bursts. Her brain fog receded.

Clarke knew she couldn’t undertake another complicated historical novel that required extensive research, so she abandoned the sequel to “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.” Instead, she began writing a surreal novel narrated by a man who has forgotten his real name and is trapped in a labyrinth, a series of endless rooms filled with strange statues and occasional ocean tides.

The philosophical puzzle at the story’s center reflected some of Clarke’s preoccupations: The narrator, Piranesi, lives largely alone with seabirds and stone figures, but instead of feeling lost or lonely, he sees the halls as a place of infinite wonders.

Clarke had nearly finished the novel before she saw the parallels between the fictional labyrinth and her illness.

“I was subliminally aware that I was writing about someone in a fairly isolated position, but who was able to find a huge amount of meaning in that,” she said.

When “Piranesi” was published in 2020, readers who had feared Clarke might never produce another novel were ecstatic. Critics pronounced it a masterpiece: “If her first novel established her as one of the world’s best fantasy writers, ‘Piranesi’ is set to place her in the pantheon of the greats, no modifier necessary,” said a review in New York Magazine.

“Piranesi” was another turning point in Clarke’s life, one that showed her a possible way out of the labyrinth she’d been trapped in. Her work took on a more reflective and spiritual register, a shift that draws her closer to her hero, C.S. Lewis.

She belongs to a progressive, loosely Anglican spiritual group that meets online for prayer and meditation; on occasion, she delivers sermons to a congregation of 10 or 12 people at her village chapel. Sometimes, to relax, she watches YouTube reviews of perfume, and old British game shows. When she’s well enough, she and Greenland go on outings to local pubs and coffee shops.

Along with the new novel set in the world of “Strange and Norrell,” Clarke is also working on another book, set partly during the Industrial Revolution in 1840s Bradford, where she lived as a child. Clarke described it as an “anti-horror” novel, with a fantastical premise that reflects her belief that something sublime is hidden within the mundane.

Clarke is still drawn to the idea of magic. For her, magic isn’t something otherworldly and distant, it’s “the idea of something elemental, something transcendent” that exists all around us.

“I feel very strongly that if you could see the world as it really is, if you could get further beyond your ego and the sorts of ways in which we trap ourselves, if you could just see the world beyond, every moment would be miraculous,” she said.

She’s come to believe that the limitations imposed by her illness haven’t made her any less of a writer. She’s a different writer now, but no less ambitious or inventive.

“Somebody said to me, pray the way you can and not the way you think you’re supposed to, and I think it’s the same for writing: Write the way you can and not the way you think you’re supposed to,” Clarke said. “I’ve only ever had any success by doing my own weird thing, following the path that’s in front of me.”