Kate Mosse: the woman with the golden touch | Life and style | The GuardianKate Mosse: the woman with the golden touch
Novelist Kate Mosse talks about feminism, family and founding the Orange prize
Author and founder of the Orange prize Kate Mosse. Photograph: Linda Nylind
On more than one occasion in our interview, Kate Mosse shakes her head, and says, "Obviously you can't write that. It sounds too gooey." It's a recognition of just how charmed her life can sound; looked at from a distance, it could easily make bitter eyes burn green. There are her two bestselling adventure novels, Labyrinth and Sepulchre; her steering of the Orange prize from scandal to success; the long, happy relationship with her first love, Greg; the two kids she clearly adores. In fact, if you are a troubled writer, or just a troubled person, a part of me recommends you look away now: this story won't necessarily make you feel better.
Full disclosure: I first met her some months ago, when I was a judge on the Orange prize. She immediately made me want to confide my darkest secrets – perhaps a result of her growing up as one of three tight-knit sisters. She has been described as having "indefatigable enthusiasm and steely charm", but while the former is certainly true, her manner is not really steely, but head-girlishly straight- forward. (She is the eldest sister; she knows that this shows.) Mosse was from Chichester, moved to London, and then back. Her success is big town; her chosen life is small town.
At 47, she has just published her latest novel, The Winter Ghosts. She is modest to a fault about her writing – regularly referring to her books as "yarns", which lowers expectations alarmingly. Yet The Winter Ghosts is a deftly written tale, propelling you compulsively through the story of Freddie, a young man adrift in the late 1920s, after his beloved brother has been killed in the first world war.
Mosse says the starting point for the story, "was really the nature of grief, and how incredibly hard it was for everybody, but particularly young men, to be allowed to grieve after the first world war. What would it be like if you idolised your older brother, and you'd never quite been the wanted child, but he made it all right – then he was gone?"
The answer is that you might have a breakdown, head to southern France, crash your car, and become embroiled in a woodland community suffering its own terrible loss. Like the two novels that precede it, The Winter Ghosts knits together eras, combines a strong historical story with a more modern one, and makes it clear that, while times and values may shift, people's deepest concerns don't change much.
It looks likely to be another success – surprising, in some ways, since Mosse never set out to be a writer. Growing up with a solicitor father and amateur archaeologist mother, she was determined to be a musician, practising her violin constantly, until, at about 16, she realised she "wasn't good enough. Well," she revises, "I was good enough to be in an orchestra, but I wasn't any better than that." She couldn't have been a soloist? "Exactly. And I knew that I would not be happy."
After her all-girls' comprehensive, she studied English at Oxford, and discovered feminism. Between her sisters and her school, Mosse had grown up in a strong female environment; she had never considered anything off-limits to women. On joining a consciousness-raising group in the early 80s, she started discussing the issues of the era, "Reclaim the Night, pornography, rape . . . Some of what was said was just jolly silly, but some gave me pause. I began to call myself a feminist – and still absolutely do – because it was the first time that I'd consciously thought that things might be different for someone just because they were a woman. Before that I had thought, rather naively, that we were all judged, very straightforwardly, on what we did."
After temping at the publisher Hodder & Stoughton, she landed a permanent job and began racing through the ranks. By her early 30s, she was an editorial director at Hutchinson, and was offered a promotion. She didn't take it. Pregnant with her second child, she had been "whingeing" to an agent friend about the contradictions this prompted – she'd always thought herself free of body image worries, for instance; now she found herself in the thick of them. He encouraged her to write about it. She left her job, and the book, Becoming a Mother, led to another non-fiction book, and then, following more encouragement from a friendly editor, her first two novels, Eskimo Kissing, and Crucifix Lane.
Along the way she became a founder of the Orange literary prize for women, prompted by an all-male Booker prize shortlist in 1991. To Mosse, the argument was, to repeat one of her favourite words, straightforward: the industry knew that a large proportion of what they published was by women, who also made up a majority of their audience, yet book awards didn't reflect this at all. Mosse genuinely thought, "that everybody who loved books would be throwing their hats in the air!" about the new prize, but instead there was a wave of accusations that it was sexist, unnecessary, a lame duck. A headline above photos of the six shortlisted authors read, "Obscene, brutal, boring and dreary drivel".
Did Mosse consider jacking it in? "No. If the critics who said that it was sexist [to exclude men] had also been campaigning when women weren't allowed to be ordained, I would have respected that, but they weren't. The other criticism that was interesting was that it's a second-rate prize because men aren't included. I thought, 'They don't think that the Booker is second-rate because only certain countries – based on a very old, imperial system – are eligible.'" (While the Orange prize is open to all English language novels written by women, the Booker excludes US authors.) The moment that she knew it would be fine was when Iris Murdoch turned up at the first Orange prize party; when Anne Michaels's brilliant Fugitive Pieces won the prize in its second year – having sold only 800 copies beforehand – the carping calmed.
Mosse sometimes describes herself, her politics, as woolly – she says that her husband, who took her surname, is a far more hardline feminist than she is. But with her forthright dedication, her 4am starts, her clear devotion to family (her mother, father and mother-in-law all live with her), she has achieved a huge amount.
The Orange prize, for which she is the honorary director, seems to have changed the culture: since it launched, the number of female Booker nominees has soared, a significant shift. And, having only really seen herself as a proper writer since starting Labyrinth, she has come into her own on the page. It might seem "gooey" to say it, but Kate Mosse's success is thoroughly deserved. Don't hate her for it.
The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse, published by Orion, is out now, price £14.99. To order a copy for £13.99 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.
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