Interview

Anna Hope discusses her novel Wake set in London at the close of World War I

Wake takes place in London at the close of World War I. What drew you to that that time period?

It's funny, I came at WW1 sideways - I was reading a lot of women's social history from the turn of the 20th century, and was fascinated by women's fight for the vote and the early suffrage campaigns. I knew that the vote had been granted for most women in Britain in 1918, but I wanted to know why, what had changed for women during this period? Then, the more I started to research the period of the end of the war, the more I became compelled by what I learned of British society of the time. The Empire, which before the war had been so sure of its status in the word, was brought low and crippled with grief. Servicemen were homeless and begging on the streets. Hardly any family was untouched by death. There was great social unrest. The cracks were beginning to appear in all of those patriarchal certainties women voting, gaining new independences, bobbing their hair and binding their breasts.

To add to this was the fact that the government had taken the unilateral decision not to bring any of the bodies home from the Western Front. So all of those dead young men were buried in graveyards close to where they had died in Belgium and ...