Q. Britain was undergoing great social and political change in the postwar period, which you connect to the difficulties of the Ayres family. What was happening in British society at this time?
Sarah Waters: It was a time of real transformation. The Second World War was a national trauma, but it was also in many ways fantastically liberating. In The Night Watch I looked at the freedoms gained in wartime by women and by gay people; The Little Stranger is more about class. During the war, the British class structure got a bit of a shake up. The return to peacetime saw ordinary people wanting a better deal for themselves and their families: decent housing, education, and health care. Men and women who might once have gone into domestic service were now able to find better-paid jobs, and more independence, in new post-war industries. They were supported by the Labour party, which came to power on the back of an astonishing landslide victory in 1945. For the upper classes, an old way of life had disappeared: the world seemed to be sliding into chaos. Novels and diaries of the period are full of angst about the situation – an angst which unfortunately often manifests itself as snobbery, as a fear and loathing of working-class people. In The Little Stranger, I suppose I’ve pushed this angst to its logical conclusion: I have a gentry family in violent decline, being terrorized by forces they don’t understand and can’t control.
Q. Medicine is changing as well, as Britain moves to establish a National Health Service for the first time. How does this affect Dr. Faraday?
Sarah Waters: Yes, this was one of the great successes of the post-war Labour government: the granting of free medical treatment, by right, to every British citizen. Until then, doctors had had to run their practices as businesses, in competition with local rivals. Dr. Faraday is struggling to make a profit from his, but at the same time he’s suspicious of the forthcoming Health Service – as most GPs of the period were – because he fears he’ll lose control of his work and income. So he has ambivalent feelings about all the social changes, just as the Ayreses have.