SUSANNA CLARKE

Susanna Clarke lives in Cambridge, England, where she spends most of her time editing cookbooks and watching people take photographs of food. For her stories she likes to blend history with magic. She is currently working on a novel set in a nineteenth-century Britain where magic is a respectable profession, more or less. Her other stories appear in the anthologies Starlight and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: Book of Dreams.

According to Susanna Clarke “On Lickerish Hill” is set in East Anglia in the seventeenth century, when the distinctions between superstition and scientific investigation were not as clear-cut as they are today. The Brief Lives and Miscellanies of Miranda’s “deare Friend,” John Aubrey, are full of accounts of fairies and spirit-possession that he got from “eye witnesses.” Confusion between the fairies they heard about from their neighbors and the Pharisees in the Bible was commonplace among country people.