We chat with author Bridget Collins about The Silence Factory, which is a captivating story of gothic suspense about a powerful family, the magical and dangerous silk their fortune is built upon, and the exploitative history they are desperately trying to hide.
Hi, Bridget! Welcome back! How have the past three years been since we last spoke for the release of The Betrayals?
Hello, and thank you for having me! Wow, it’s been a long time… Things have been great, thank you – a lot of that time I spent writing and editing The Silence Factory, but there have been a few other projects (including some bestselling ghost stories, with more to come), not to mention some big life events like buying our first house! And now I’m editing my next book, which is slated for UK publication in about a year – there’s not much time to relax, but I like it that way.
Your latest novel, The Silence Factory, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Seduction, complicity, mystery, love, evil.
What can readers expect?
It’s a little like The Binding in the sense that it’s set in nineteenth-century England, and it has the same kind of almost-fantastical premise: in this case, it’s about a beautiful, glamorous fabric made from spider silk which can create perfect silence. The main character, Henry, is a recently bereaved widower who gets drawn into the world of the factory and its owner – but as he falls deeper and deeper in love with it all he begins to realise that there’s a sinister, evil underbelly. There’s another narrative strand too, which is the story of how the spiders are brought back to England from Greece, told by Sophia, a young explorer’s wife, in diary entries. Like Henry, she falls in love and discovers that everything she thinks she knows about herself is wrong…
Where did the inspiration for The Silence Factory come from?
I think it started simply with a kind of wish-fulfilment! I often yearn for silence in a very visceral way – I hate the way the modern world is always clamouring for your attention – and so I daydreamed about being able to shut it out perfectly and easily, with one sweep of a curtain. But every kind of power brings with it a capacity to backfire or be abused, and that’s really where the story came from – I couldn’t stop imagining that dark side, and the arising tension between desire and wisdom…
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Oh yes, lots! I think the scene I most enjoyed writing was a moment where Henry suddenly finds his voice. He’s been asked to give a speech, and he’s prepared something that’s rather staid and boring, and he’s dreading it – and then, suddenly, he gets inspired and delivers something off the cuff that makes everyone fall completely silent and listen to him with absolute attention. I suppose it’s every public speaker’s fantasy, and of course when you’re writing you can write and rewrite until it works! It’s a pivotal moment for the character too: the point where he tips from dutiful timidity into bravery and ambition. But probably the character I most loved writing in general was Philomel, the factory owner’s little daughter. She’s profoundly deaf (I think calling her Deaf might be anachronistic), and there were some fascinating challenges around writing sign language – but what I liked best about her is that she is sparky and clever and more articulate than everyone else in the book. It was such a joy to have a character who was utterly, authentically herself and not self-deceiving or playing games (although to be fair those are fun to write too).
Can you tell us about some of the challenges you faced whilst writing The Silence Factory and how you were able to overcome them?
I started writing The Silence Factory in early 2020, the week before I had my first baby – so it’s all a bit of a haze of newborn sleeplessness and then lockdown, so I guess it’s not surprising that it didn’t come out perfectly formed! But the biggest challenge I faced was definitely that I began the book before I knew what it was about, because I felt I just needed to write something. So the first draft was a mess. I got very hung up on the concepts – silence and sound and spiders, etc etc – but I hadn’t thought enough about what the emotional narrative was, or how it fitted together. There was a lot of dumping of information, and no depth – there were a few moments of drama, but they came out of nowhere and didn’t have the right punch. When I sent it to my agent she told me she didn’t know what was wrong with it, mainly because she couldn’t see what I was trying to do in the first place…
As for how I overcame it, I rewrote it entirely from scratch! I’ve never had to do that with a book before, and it was hard. But it was also amazingly satisfying (and a great relief) when the “right” book began to reveal itself to me. The transformation was enormous, and although it was a much longer and more laborious process than with any of my other books (and hopefully that includes future books as well, ha ha), I am so proud, looking back, of how I stuck with it and made it into what it is now.
What’s your process when it comes to research for your novel?
I generally do research in two phases. The first is before I start, reading everything and anything that’s vaguely related to the subject/period I have in mind, drinking it all in without worrying about how relevant it is – that’s the way things permeate and mix up together and cross-fertilise. It’s a great way to get ideas, and sometimes it can change the direction I end up taking quite fundamentally. Then, as I write, it becomes clearer and clearer what precisely I don’t know and need to know. So at that point I’ll try to answer whatever specific questions have arisen. That’s much more painstaking and less rewarding (because sometimes I can spend hours looking for some tiny scrap of information and never actually find it) – but it has to be done! I would love to employ someone just to find out things for me, like “how many forks would be on this table for this dinner?” or “in 1860, could you buy a box of raw mother-of-pearl to make into things, and if so how much would it cost?” but I think I’d need to be much richer than I currently am. I do my best, but I also have to be realistic – in extremis I just rewrite the scene to gloss over the gap in my knowledge!
What’s next for you?
I’m currently editing my next book, which has a working title of Self Portrait, With Shadows. It’s set in 1920, so in the aftermath of the Great War, and it’s about an artist who during the war worked at the Studio for Portrait Masks in Paris. She moves to a quiet Sussex village to try to paint, but there are ghosts there who are attracted to human likenesses, and they begin to converge on her, attracted by her portraits… It was partly inspired by a fabulous book about the “Surplus Women”, the millions of women who were left without men after the War, having grown up believing that being a wife and mother was going to be their life’s work and meaning. In a way it’s a book about living with collective trauma – but, like most of my other books, it’s also a love story.
Lastly, what books have you enjoyed so far this year and are there any that you can’t wait to get your hands on?
I’ve been really lucky recently, reading some fantastic “new new” books as well as some “old new” books, if you see what I mean! For new releases, I’ve loved Emilia Hart’s The Sirens and Lara Maiklem’s A Mudlarking Year. For classics I’d never read before, I read IT for the first time (I know, I know!) and Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment. And a chance recommendation reminded me that I didn’t read My Dark Vanessa when everyone was raving about it – so I have got that and can’t wait to get my teeth into it…
