Penelope Lively was born to British parents in Cairo in 1933, where her father was assistant to the director of the National Bank of Egypt. She spent the first twelve years of her life in the Egyptian capital, a childhood “no more—or less—interesting than anyone else’s,” she writes in her 1994 memoir, Oleander, Jacaranda, though it was marked by the notable characteristic of being British in Egypt and “learning how to perceive the world in the ambience of a quite different culture.” That childhood came to what Lively calls “an abrupt and traumatic end” in 1945, when she was taken to England and enrolled in boarding school, “a grim rite of passage.” Lively has never written extensively about her adolescence. “Ah yes, that extraordinary business of the malevolence of teenage girls,” she said when asked about this. “It would have been a good thing to have written about. I don’t think I could recover it now, it’s too far away, but I really should have.” 

This unwritten story is easy to imagine, especially as Lively began her career writing books for children. This was in the early seventies, when she was a young mother and married to Jack Lively, a political theorist whose academic posts took his family to various universities in Great Britain: Swansea in Wales, then Sussex, and later Warwick and Oxford. Lively’s first novel for adults, The Road to Lichfield, was published in 1977. It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, as was her 1984 novel According to Mark. Moon Tiger, the story of an elderly woman looking back over her life, won the Booker Prize in 1987. To date, Lively is the only writer to have been awarded both the Booker Prize and the Carnegie Medal for outstanding children’s fiction, which went to The Ghost of Thomas Kempe in 1973.

Along with her industrious writing career—more than twenty books for children, seventeen novels, five collections of short stories, five volumes of memoirs, and an introduction to landscape history—Lively used to travel widely with the British Council and sat on the board of the British Library. Now, at eighty-five, she lives at a slower pace. Her most recent book, Life in the Garden, guides readers through the various gardens she’s loved and tended, from that of her childhood home in Cairo to the small plot behind her Islington townhouse where she’s lived alone since Jack’s death, in 1998.

It was in this house our interviews took place; I visited Lively twice in the spring. On the first occasion—a chilly February morning—we chatted over coffee in the bright upstairs sitting room, elegantly decorated with works by Lively’s artist aunt, Rachel Reckitt. When I returned for our second conversation a couple weeks later, Lively showed me into her study on the ground floor. The room was full of evidence of ongoing work: books were stacked in front of the fireplace, and neat piles of papers sat atop a desk and on a shelf beside her chair. She was working on an introduction to a forthcoming volume of poetry for children, as well as writing a review of Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje, for the New York Times. Coincidentally, only three months later, she and Ondaatje found themselves pitted against each other for the Golden Man Booker Prize. When the short list was announced, I sent Lively a card to offer my congratulations. Her response was imbued with the same polite modesty I noted during our conversations: she was greatly surprised, she wrote, to find Moon Tiger unexpectedly “resurrected” in this way.

—Lucy Scholes

INTERVIEWER

Given that the presence of the past is an abiding theme in your work, was there anything in your family history that suggested you would grow up to become a writer?

LIVELY

Absolutely not. There had never been anyone in my family who’d written. The one thing that I do think had an effect on me was the rather curious education I had. I was educated at home by somebody who started as my nanny and then reinvented herself as my governess, though she herself had left school at sixteen. She worked from a do-it-yourself home-education kit called the Parents’ National Educational Union, which actually, when I look at it now, is exemplary. It was training in comprehension and how to express oneself in writing. It might not have suited all children, but it was perfect for me. So my education was heavily dependent on reading, although—because this was Egypt during the war—a lot of the books that were sent out ended up at the bottom of the Mediterranean, along with rather more important wartime supplies, so we had to make do with what we had. Lucy, my governess, was paid-up Church of England, and we depended heavily on the Bible. It didn’t turn me into a Christian—I’m an agnostic. But I still have in my head the language of the King James Bible, and I’m grateful for that. We also read Dickens to each other, in a sort of literary innocence. In a funny way it was the perfect education for someone who was going to end up a writer, although I had no idea of that at the time.

INTERVIEWER

Your parents weren’t tempted to send you to England when the war broke out?

LIVELY

Interestingly, I was here in September 1939—we visited England most summers before the war—and can remember hearing Chamberlain’s broadcast announcing the outbreak of war. I was sitting on the floor in the drawing room of my grandmother’s house, Golsoncott, where everybody had been asked to come in to listen, and I was told that I must sit very still and keep quiet. I remember hearing this thin, dry male voice coming out of the wireless saying, We are now at war with Germany. But of course it meant nothing to me. I was six. I didn’t understand why the grown-ups were all looking so solemn.

INTERVIEWER

But you and your parents returned to Egypt. Looking back, does it strike you as an odd decision for them to have made?

LIVELY

My father hadn’t come over that summer, and strangely enough, my mother had already gone back by this point. My grandmother had taken a whole party of family to Chamonix, in France. I think there were almost a dozen of us, but nobody was reading the news. My aunt Rachel, who had stayed at home, was furiously wiring her mother saying, Kindly read the papers and advise you return. Meanwhile, my mother, in the move that really astonishes me, went off and joined some friends in the South of France for a bit and then went from there back to Egypt. So Lucy and I returned with my grandmother to Golsoncott. And then, after war was declared, there was a great exchange of telegrams between my grandmother and my parents. My grandmother saying, Leave her here, and my parents saying, No, no, send her back. In the end, my parents won, and they told Lucy to join a party of other expat British people heading back to Egypt. So she and I crossed Europe just ahead of the Germans. We went by train down through France and sailed from Venice.

INTERVIEWER

With hindsight, it seems like madness to have undertaken this journey.

LIVELY

Oh, it was extraordinary. The person I admire most is Lucy. She could just have said, Hang on, I’m going to spend the war in my own country. But she didn’t.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve written very lovingly about the relationship between the two of you, explaining that you were much closer to her than to your mother, because it was Lucy who looked after you.

LIVELY

Yes. To be fair to my mother, she was just being totally conventional. Middle-class women of her day had nannies. It would have been odd not to. But she was more detached than most mothers, and I didn’t see an awful lot of her really, so Lucy and I were in a happy little enclave of our own. It was a harsh system because for Lucy I was a surrogate child. When we came back to England—this is when I was twelve, after my parents’ divorce—my father decided to send me to boarding school and just told her to go. I always felt he hadn’t treated her very well. It made me feel that, when I had children of my own, nobody but me was ever going to look 
after them.

INTERVIEWER

In your memoir A House Unlocked (2001), you describe your childhood as having been spent “in a state of continuous internal story-telling.” Were you aware you were doing this at the time, or was it something that only dawned on you later in life?

LIVELY

I think it was just something that came naturally. It all sprang from the fact that I was absolutely obsessed with Andrew Lang’s Victorian retellings of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I identified with them because I was in there—but with the wrong part, because Penelope is described as being wise and good, which were qualities that didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to be beautiful Helen, of course. I had a very solitary childhood. I was an only child, and I saw other children only about once a week, when Lucy and I would go into Cairo to meet up with the other nannies, so I think it was probably a way of peopling this solitude. I hardly realized I was doing it, but also probably assumed that everybody else did it, too.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned that your access to books was limited. Was there no lending library in Cairo?

LIVELY

No. I do remember waiting desperately for each new Arthur Ransome that was published. I would save up my pocket money. I was absolutely fascinated by them and their exotic landscapes of lakes and greenery and so forth.

INTERVIEWER

And there was a bookshop in the city where you could buy them?

LIVELY

Yes, the Anglo-Egyptian Bookshop, I think it was called, and that was a treasured place. We used to go there quite often. I remember that I would immediately dash to the children’s section and sit there reading. The proprietress was very nice—she would laugh about it. Lucy used to say, You can’t read the books you’re not going to buy. And the proprietress would say, Oh, leave her alone. Let her read.

INTERVIEWER

Is there a connection between the internal storytelling you indulged in as a child and your adult interest in trying to reconstruct how a child looks at things? I am thinking of your first memoir, Oleander, Jacaranda, in particular.

LIVELY

I think probably not, because the idea for the way of doing that book actually came to me rather long after it began. When my first grandchild was born—Rachel, who’s now nearly thirty—I remember thinking, One day this child might be interested in my very odd childhood. And so I wanted to jot down my memories. It was just going to be something that I’d show her later on. But as I did it, I began seeing my memories with the wisdom of adult hindsight and thinking, Goodness, this could be rather interesting to write about in a completely different way. I suspect the obsessive internal storytelling does have something to do with ending up as a fiction writer, along with obsessive reading. I know lots and lots of writers, and frankly I don’t know any who are not obsessive readers. The two things go together. I think there’s an odd way in which reading merges into writing. It certainly did for me. But the storytelling is something else.

INTERVIEWER

This makes me think about the way you write children. They’re not described from an adult’s point of view, be it that of the narrator or another character, but from a unique vantage. You pay close attention to how a child perceives the world around them, as compared to an adult in the same setting. Is this related to you having written books for children?

LIVELY

I think it’s just part of the expansive process of creating characters. If you’re a woman writing about men, for example, you’re making a kind of qualitative leap to think not so much about how a man thinks but how a man operates. I’ve never thought men and women were so much different in terms of attitudes or behavior, but you realize that the world is a little bit different if you’re a man. I think that’s the same when you’re writing children—a child is a different kind of person. When creating a child character, you’re trying to think both back and across. Back on what you can recall of your own childhood experience, which I think is very difficult to recover, and across in terms of observing the experience of your own children or of other children. I always used to think it was incredibly bold, in a sense, to presume that what one wrote as an adult, out of one’s adult experience and way of expression, would be accessible to a child. It’s so very difficult, an extraordinary change of gear. You’re trying to think, How can I engage this child with what I’m writing, even though I’m writing out of an experience that the child doesn’t know? It’s like W. H. Auden said—“There are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experience, but there are no good books which are only for children.” It always seemed to me that writing for children had a lot in common with writing short stories. When writing a short story, you’ve got to grab the reader in the first couple lines, and the same goes for writing for a child. If you don’t grab the child on the first page, you’ve already lost them.

INTERVIEWER

What made you switch from children’s books to fiction for adults?

LIVELY

Well, for a little bit, I suppose it was two or three years, I wrote both very actively. Then the children’s books left me totally. I realized, somehow, that it was going and that if I went on with it, I was just going to repeat myself. And so I just thought, Better stop before I spoil it. I knew that there are limitations to writing for children, whole areas of experience that you can’t write about, and this was going to be too restrictive.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve written about how, prior to writing, you were reading voraciously. You’d take your young children with you to the local library in Swansea, where you were living at the time, and fill the pram up with books to bring home. Was this an effort to educate yourself?

LIVELY

At Oxford, I chose to read history. It was a totally ignorant decision, one that would have English literature teachers up and down the country infuriated. I had thought, Well, I read fiction a lot anyway, but I don’t know any history, so I should read history at university. It wasn’t until decades later that I realized how crucial that choice of university subject was. I didn’t read history especially well, I didn’t get a good degree, and I didn’t read it assiduously, but it has absolutely conditioned the way in which I’ve written novels. If I hadn’t read history, I would have been writing novels differently—I’m quite sure of that. So yes, this was something of an education, but it was also just what I did. I gobbled fiction. My gratitude to the public library in Swansea is enormous. I read my way through twentieth-century Anglophone fiction.

INTERVIEWER

Do any particular authors still stand out from this period?

LIVELY

Henry James, Henry Green, whom I’d never read, Elizabeth Bowen, whom I’ve always had a huge admiration for, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. But it was more about discovering a certain kind of writing and getting really excited about it. People ask whom one’s influenced by, but for me, it’s more the discovery of the possibilities of the form. I have a clump of novels I go back to again and again because I admire them so much—Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, William Golding’s The Inheritors, and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. I know I couldn’t write anything like them, but they have been pointers for me when it comes to what can be done with the novel. It wasn’t so much influence as exposure.