Sarah Perry’s novels are like extraordinary highly coloured dreams - or nightmares. Her bestseller The Essex Serpent features a mythical sea-creature that roams the Blackwater marshes, and the novel that followed, Melmoth, is a terrifying gothic tale with a female ghost who always seems to be just behind you, almost out of sight.
In Private Passions, Sarah Perry talks to Michael Berkeley about ghosts and Gothic nightmares, and admits that the ghost in Melmoth haunted her too. She wrote the book high on painkillers amidst the ‘torment’ of spinal collapse, an experience of pain which thankfully she recovered from, but which has changed her view of life. She looks back on her upbringing in the Strict Baptist Chapel, in which popular culture was banned – but classical music was played on speakers so large they reached her shoulders, and Beethoven blasted her out of bed at night.
She talks too about Essex, and trying to live down the social shame of being an “Essex Girl” – before realising that Essex girls have a proud tradition, and being an Essex girl was something to aspire to: loud, pleasure-loving, refusing to fit in.
Sarah Perry was a viola player as a child, and her music choices include one of Hindemith’s sonatas for viola – which she describes as “the Essex girl of instruments”. She also loves late Beethoven quartets, and Dvorak, and Bach, and the contemporary composer Stephen Crowe, whose setting of fragments from Sappho is one of her choices. She hates jazz – well, almost all jazz. She invites us to hear the one track that completely seduced her.
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke