Here are a few things you probably don’t already know about Sarah Waters: she has a man-crush on David Tennant, the slightly ordinary looking actor who plays Dr Who. She owns a Smart sports car because she loves to burn up the road but not at the planet’s expense. She’s dutifully watching the last series of ER even though she admits it’s crap and unlike her girlfriend of seven years, Lucy, she’s not a fan of Desperate Housewives. ‘It’s a bit sanitised. I wanted something with sex and swearing; something like Sex And The City.’ Oh, and she gave up on The L Word in season two.

When I enquire whether she’d ask Tennant to play Dr Faraday, the inscrutable village doctor in her new book, The Little Stranger, she shakes her head. I get the impression that if she met him at a casting, she’d probably giggle like schoolgirl. ‘Yes, you’re right, I probably would.’

Dr Faraday is emblematic of one of the key themes in her ambitious 1940s ghost story: the shifting in social mobility that took place in England directly after the Second World War. ‘You can’t read 40s novels or diaries without thinking about class,’ she tells me when we meet at her publisher’s plush offices on the Victoria Embankment. ‘Middle class people were very pre-occupied with the sense that something was changing and not for the good. Often, the more conservative they were, the more of a crisis they thought it was. I wanted to explore that more than I’d been able to in The Night Watch and partly that’s why I moved out of London because I thought a rural (Warwickshire) setting would be more stark. People were leaving the villages, working class people didn’t want to be servants of the ‘big ’ouse’ any more and a way of life was coming to an abrupt end. That was right at the heart of the book for me even before I thought of turning it into a haunted house novel. The conflicts I was writing about were so intense, I thought maybe a supernatural novel with poltergeists would be the best way of talking about it.’

Our interest in the paranormal is a perennially fascinating phenomenon for Waters. The more anxious a culture is, she believes, the more it will be interested in the supernatural both as a consolation and as an expression of our anxiety. She’s not wrong – the rise in popularity of TV shows like Britain’s Most Haunted or The Ghost Whisperer, Buffy and the slew of vampire movies all suggest our contemporary fear of the future. The place of women in society is also examined through the lead character of ‘plain, intelligent’ Caroline. Fiercely independent yet financially and socially reliant on men, she struggles with the expectations of the period.

When researching the book, Waters tells how she read a biography of 1950s writer Mary Wesley, who liked to wear trousers. Unfortunately her neighbours didn’t approve and eventually forced her to traipse around the village in flowing skirts. ‘It makes you realise the deep vein of conservatism that you can get in the country and yet there’s also been a tradition of rural women managing estates and mucking in and, for me, Caroline was both those things – trapped by gender expectations because she is plain and clever, but very capable.’
Could we read Caroline as a lesbian? ‘I think some people might do but I didn’t mean that. Although there were times where she was getting butcher by the moment.’

This seems an appropriate time to discuss why, for the first time since Tipping The Velvet, there are no obvious lesbian characters in her fifth novel. Waters is well aware that some readers may be disappointed about the absence of a Sapphic storyline. Despite the support of her true fans on online message board threads she’s noticed that, somewhat unnervingly, people have been second-guessing her motives.

‘It wasn’t like I thought, “I’m not going to write a lesbian novel”; it was “I want to write a story. Oh, and it’s not lesbian this time”. Writing is a much odder process than that. You have to write the book that feels right for you. The story grabbed me and it didn’t seem like there would be a romance in it at all. It wasn’t in any way me turning my back on or betraying lesbians. I wanted to explore other themes. I feel like I’ve written four thoroughly lesbian novels now and I’m very obviously an out lesbian. At the same time I do understand why some lesbians are disappointed because we don’t see ourselves represented well that often.’

Because of her visual writing style, traditional plots and character development, all of her novels have been adapted for TV – The Night Watch has also been optioned. Would she like to see this one as a movie? ‘Well, it would be nice because it would be a different experience and this one is not episodic in the way the others have been.’ It doesn’t seem an unreasonable stretch to imagine The Little Stranger as a Hollywood adaptation. With its themes of social unrest and uncertainty, time and indeed timing certainly seem to be on her side.

The Little Stranger took about two years to write – roughly half the time of her previous novel. She credits this in part to her rigorous writing routine – working nine to five, every day of the week. It might sound like a recipe for disaster but she and Lucy quickly warmed to it. ‘It was really productive and Lucy is always happy to stay at home and potter around. She was saying, “God, we can get so much more done if we don’t have weekends”, so she was baking bread and fermenting things – she’s really into that – and we started thinking we could nominate any day as our weekend if we did want a break. We created our own little world. I don’t know if that’s really healthy but it was good to know I could change it if I had to.’ Copy editor Lucy does all the cooking in their South London home and with her finely tuned eye for detail was, says Waters, a brilliant help through the various drafts of the novel. ‘She even told me that I can go on all I like about how plain Caroline is and if it does get made into a film, they’ll just cast Kate Winslet. That’s as ‘ugly’ as Hollywood gets. But that would be alright.’
The Little Stranger is published by Virago.

Readers’ Questions

Who are your role models?Floss McKinlay, Edinburgh
Sylvia Townsend Warner has always been a heroine of mine: a brilliant writer, a devoted lover, and a committed socialist. If I had a tenth of her talent and wisdom, I’d be delighted.

What’s your favourite sandwich?Jo, Brighton
Cheese and pickled onion. But it has to be my mother’s own home-pickled onions – the best in the world.

What are your thoughts on Amazon stripping LGBTQ material (which includes Tipping the Velvet) from their rankings?Niamh McNamara, Republic of Ireland
I was appalled and disgusted (though secretly, too, rather thrilled at being blacklisted; my life doesn’t have much excitement in it these days). It’s just one more reason, of course, to stop using Amazon and to support our local independent booksellers instead.

Do you miss your characters when you finish books? Which ones do you most miss?Louise, London
I always think I’m going to miss them desperately. I was very sorry to have to say goodbye to Kay, in The Night Watch; I liked her a lot. I liked Caroline in The Little Stranger, too. But actually, by the time I finish a book I am usually pretty exhausted with it, and quite excited about moving on to the next one. Writers are serial monogamists, I suppose.

When you first wrote about lesbians, what was the most annoying question/reaction from the mainstream press who interviewed you?Sarah Profit, Manchester
I think people expected me to be more like the characters in my books. When they met me for the first time, they would always say something along the lines of: ‘Goodness, you’re not what I was expecting at all!’ – thereby missing the essential point, of course, that if I did look like one of my own characters, I wouldn’t be stuck at home writing novels – I’d be out getting myself picked up by rich older women.

Did you feel pressure as a writer to stop writing about lesbian life/love or did it bore you as a writer in terms of scope?Sarah Profit, Manchester
I’ve never felt any sort of pressure to write a particular kind of book; I’ve just pursued the stories that have come along and grabbed me. I don’t feel bored by lesbian themes, either – I’ve lots of plans to return to them in the future. But ultimately you have to let your books go where they want – that’s part of the excitement of being a writer.

What makes you want to write, where do you get your inspiration from?Sara Robinson, London
Sometimes I think I’m motivated to write by anxiety. Life is random and cruel, but there’s a kind of safety in sitting at my desk, cooking up neat little worlds of my own – even if those worlds end up random and cruel, too. But mainly I know I want to write because I love reading. I want to write the kind of book that I would like to read myself. As for inspiration – it comes from all over the place. You just have to be on the lookout for it.

Would you and your girlfriend ever consider getting civilly partnered?Josie, Birmingham
Maybe – but probably only for practical purposes. We’ve been together for seven years. I feel thoroughly married to her already, in all the truest meanings of the word.

Name five books you couldn’t live without.Victoria, London
I’d have to go for: Great Expectations; Jane Eyre; Rebecca; Walter’s My Secret Life; and the London A-Z.