While Shakespeare’s plays are known for making wonderful romantic comedies, it can be hard to transpose the Bard’s themes into modern-day literary fiction. Yet in Private Rites, a beautifully rendered new novel from Julia Armfield, the King Lear-esque central conflict between three queer sisters who have recently lost their self-centered, larger-than-life father feels perfectly pitched for our modern times—climate anxiety and all.
In an interview conducted over email, Armfield told Vogue about finding inspiration in a live production of King Lear; the differences between writing Private Rites and her 2022 debut, Our Wives Under the Sea; and piecing together family narratives without taking sides.
Vogue: What was it like to switch writing gears from Our Wives Under the Sea to this novel?
Julia Armfield: On a purely practical level, Our Wives was written between about March and December of 2020, so although I’m not sure I identified it as a COVID-inflected novel until long after, its scope and the world it evokes are necessarily quite limited. Private Rites is, I think, a lot broader – the worldbuilding is more extensive, the cast is larger – and I imagine that, whether subconsciously or otherwise, the circumstances in which I was writing it certainly had an impact there.
Do you have favorite pieces of climate fiction, or climate writing more generally, that helped inspire you?
I think what’s so interesting is how much of contemporary fiction is unavoidably inflected by climate concerns – novels like Kaliane Bradley’s superlative The Ministry of Time, for instance, which was not advertised first and foremost as climate writing but is simultaneously utterly shaped by concerns about this slow and terrifying descent into something we can’t put right again. I suppose writers always write about what they fear, or what they want to make sense of, and it’s unsurprising that climate anxiety colours so much new writing at the moment. In a broader sense, I’ve always been interested in literature which examines the ways in which people live alongside the natural world – novels like Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, in which the ocean and the surrounding environment are utterly necessary both to the characters and their community as well as to the overriding machinations of the plot. The symbiosis has always been interesting to me – the way we exist alongside, because of and in spite of our environment and the impact we have upon it in return.
