AUTHOR’S NOTE

My first novel was called Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast. It was published almost twenty years ago.

Beauty and the Beast has been my favourite fairy-tale since I was a little girl, but I wrote Beauty almost by accident, because the story I was trying to write was too difficult for me. Beauty was just a sort of writing exercise—at first. I very nearly didn’t have the nerve to send it to a publisher when I was done. Everyone knows the fairy-tale, I thought. Everyone knows how it ends; no one—certainly no publisher—will care.

But a publisher did take it, and a lot of people have told me they like it. And that was that. Of course I wasn’t going to tell Beauty and the Beast again, even if it was my favourite fairy-tale. Even if it has been retold hundreds of times by different storytellers, in different cultures and different centuries. Even though I knew it had resonances as deep as human nature, as the best fairy-and folk-tales do, including a lot that I couldn’t reach, though I could feel they were there.

Five years ago I moved to England to marry the writer Peter Dickinson. I was happy in Maine, where I had been living, with my typewriter, one whippet, and several thousand books, in my little lilac-covered cottage on the coast. And then I found myself three thousand miles away, in another country, living in an enormous, ramshackle house surrounded by flower-beds and covered in wisteria and clematis and ancient climbing roses whose names no one remembered.

Gardening in Maine is an epic struggle, where you can have frosts as late as June and as early as August, where a spade thrust anywhere in the so-called soil will hit granite bedrock a few inches down and rattle your teeth in your skull, and where roses are called annuals only half-jokingly. In England garden-visiting is the top item on the list of tourist attractions—before any of the cathedrals or any of the museums, before Stonehenge or the Tower of London. I didn’t plan to become a gardener, but I don’t think I could help it. Peter says that the disease had obviously been lying dormant in my blood, and southern England and a gardening husband have been a most effective catalyst.

It occurred to me, now and then, as I planted more rosebushes—because while I am a passionate gardener, I am a rose fanatic—that it’s almost a pity I’d said all I had to say about Beauty and the Beast. There was so much about roses I’d left out, because I didn’t know any better.

Last winter I sold my house in Maine. I still loved it, even though I knew I would never live there again, and I knew it would be a tremendous wrench to cut myself loose from that last major attachment of owning property in the country where I was born. I was not expecting, when Peter and I returned to Maine to close up, sign papers, and say good-bye, that everything I have missed about life in America as an American—which I had ordered myself to ignore while I put down roots over here—would rush out of hiding and start hammering me flat, like some of Tolkien’s dwarves having a go at a recalcitrant bit of gold leaf. It wasn’t just a wrench; it felt like being drawn and quartered.

We came home to southern England in a late, bleak, cold spring, and I sat at my desk and stared into space, feeling as if I were barely convalescent after a long illness.

A friend of mine who runs an art gallery in SoHo (New York, not London) asked me if I would consider writing him a short-story version of Beauty and the Beast for one of his artists to illustrate. I said no, I can’t; I’ve said all I have to say about that story.

But as I sat at my typewriter—or looked over my shoulder at the black clouds and sleet—I didn’t feel up to anything too demanding, like the novel I was supposed to be working on. I thought, I’ll have a go at this short story. Something might come of it. I can do a little more with roses; that’ll be fun.

Rose Daughter shot out onto the page in about six months. I’ve never had a story burst so fully and extravagantly straight onto the page, like Athena from the head of Zeus.

I’ve long said my books “happen” to me. They tend to blast in from nowhere, seize me by the throat, and howl, Write me! Write me now! But they rarely stand still long enough for me to see what and who they are, before they hurtle away again, and so I spend a lot of my time running after them, like a thrown rider after an escaped horse, saying, Wait for me! Wait for me!, and waving my notebook in the air. Rose Daughter happened, but it bolted with me. Writing it was quite like riding a not-quite-runaway horse, who is willing to listen to you, so long as you let it run.

If you’re a storyteller, your own life streams through you, onto the page, mixed up with the life the story itself brings; you cannot, in any useful or genuine way, separate the two. The thing that tells me when one of the pictures in my head or phrases in my ear is a story, and not a mere afternoon’s distraction, is its life, its strength, its vitality. If you were picking up stones in the dark, you would know when you picked up a puppy instead. It’s warm; it wriggles; it’s alive. But the association between my inner (storytelling) life and my outer (everything else) life is unusually close in this book. I don’t know why the story came to me in the first place, but I know that what fueled the whirlwind of getting it down on paper was my grief for my little lilac-covered cottage and for a way of life I had loved, even if I love my new life better.

I think every writer fears doing the same thing again—and thus boring her readers. But what “the same thing” is may be tricky to define. I almost didn’t write Beauty; having written it, I had absolutely no intention of reusing that plot. I read somewhere, a long time ago, a French writer, I think, saying that each writer has only one story to tell; it’s whether or not they find interesting ways to retell it that is important. The idea has stuck with me because I suspect it’s true. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that my favourite fairytale came back to me, dressed in a new story, after twenty more years in the back of my mind and the bottom of my heart—and the odd major life crisis to break it loose and urge it into my consciousness.

Maybe it’ll come to me again in another twenty years.

Hampshire, England
October 1996