Writing at full gallop

Sitting in Meg Rosoff’s comfortable Highbury kitchen sipping coffee, enjoying the welcome summer sun through the open back door is a scene in stark contrast to the hardship depicted in Rosoff’s latest book, The Bride’s Farewell (Penguin, £10.99).
Set on 19th-century Salisbury Plain, the story features a young woman, Pell Ridley, who decides to leave home on the morning of her wedding day determined to find a different life; one away from sorrow and adversity. Taking her only possession — her horse, Jack — Pell’s journey is full of mystery and romance.
“I wanted to write a book about Pegasus [the mythical horse],” says Rosoff. But, once started, she changed direction several times. A visit to the New Forest gave the novel its geographical and equestrian base, then “Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles came up and the book went from there”.
She read a lot prior to writing but not conventional historical research. “A lot of it is from my imagination,” says the American-born Rosoff, who still sees herself as “a foreigner” (she grew up in Boston). She looks at Britain, where she has lived since 1989, with an enquiring eye, be it the Suffolk countryside, where she co-owns a house, or London life.
Rosoff is an “absolute boring fanatic” about horses. She rode as a child then decided to take it up again when she finished The Bride’s Farewell a year ago. “I’d love to be able to explain it. I think it’s almost like a gene, because you meet people who have it. I tried desperately to cultivate it in my daughter and she could not have been less interested.”
Her heroine, Pell, is the “wonderful” horsewoman Rosoff would like to have been. Not that horses are the entire extent of her interests. She is fascinated by 19th-century female explorers, for example, in particular Isabella Bird, a Scottish woman who was an invalid until she was 28, when she responded to her doctor’s recommendation to travel.
“In my mind,” says Rosoff, “I imagine she just leapt of the couch, ran down to the porch and was off.” Bird’s spirit influenced Pell’s character but then the passionate Meg Rosoff, too, could, at any time, be off into the wilds, by horse of course.