In April 2024, in the wake of the US publication of her new book, Loss, A Love Story, the scholar and writer Sophie Ratcliffe visited New York City. She was there to give some talks but also to finally trace, in person, some of the haunts of Kate Field, the 19th-century American actress, journalist, and controversialist. Field is perhaps better known today for having inspired in the older British novelist Anthony Trollope a sentimental, possibly erotic, and enduring attachment. Trollope, it so happens, was avidly read by Leo Tolstoy, who puts in his heroine Anna Karenina’s hands a novel that likely was one of Trollope’s, which she reads as her train carries her away from Moscow and toward what she can only dimly suspect will be a new life as the lover of Alexei Vronsky. And it is of Anna Karenina—that novel of accumulated losses—that Ratcliffe thinks as she considers the death of her father when she was a teen, and, much later, the death of a former lover.

This chain of reflections, refractions, and survivals is the spine of Ratcliffe’s book, published in the US by Northwestern University Press. An experiment in memoir and in theory alike, Loss, A Love Story explores the relations between bereavement and the imagination, between how we read and how we remember, between the books that stay with us and the loved ones who can’t.

During that visit to New York, Ratcliffe and I began a conversation about her work, one which we extended over email in the weeks that followed. How does an academic—a researcher and critic—find herself writing a memoir of loss, and what about her writing has to change, and what doesn’t, when she does so? What is the difference, if any, between fictional characters and the characters of one’s own past? Is memory a kind of research? That email conversation is captured below.

Sophie Ratcliffe is Professor of Literature and Creative Criticism at Oxford University. A historian of reading, her prolific output includes On Sympathy (2008), P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters (2013), and a monthly column for the Guardian called “The Last Word.” Her recent academic research focuses on the history, and future, of libraries for children.

Nicholas Dames (ND): Let me begin with what might be the inevitable question. You are, in perhaps a workaday sense, a literary academic. How then did you find yourself writing Loss, A Love Story, which is many things (and we’ll discuss those things) but would be classified by many as a memoir, of childhood loss and its reverberations across a life?

Sophie Ratcliffe (SR): It’s an inevitable question, but a good one. “Memoir.” It’s a word that carries so much baggage; at least to me.

There’s a podcast that really struck a chord with me on this subject. It’s Eileen Myles talking about their amazing book about grief, Afterglow: A Dog Memoir. I love what they say about the memoir genre: that it was a form and a word that they’d “never claimed” because they’d always thought of it “as sort of hokey and sentimental.” And when asked in the podcast interview about how they feel about having written something that is so much “from the heart,” Myles says that they “didn’t have the option of writing that other book.” That chimes with me.

In the beginning, I didn’t really set out to write a memoir, but I certainly set out to write something about life beyond academia. The reason being that, at the point I began Loss, A Love Story, I was wondering whether I really and truly had a life within academia. I was struggling to feel that I had a space within the institution of the university, to feel that the kind of writing and research that I did fit within its walls, practically and emotionally. I had two young children and was the primary carer for them, with all that comes with that. And the demands of that care meant that I couldn’t easily get to archives, or conferences, or seminars. The time I had to think and write in, around teaching, was extremely fragmented.

I was about to say that I found this situation really difficult. But (putting on my historian of emotion hat here), I think I was actually pretty pissed off.

I felt a kind of anger—not at any institution or individual—but in relation to the way structures in general were working. Pissed off because (while of course conscious of my privilege, particularly the fact that I had a job at all) there was still a sense in which I felt a bit stuck on the fringes of the enterprise—not least of all because I was still at that point in the final stage of my probationary period of employment—so publishing, meeting potential referees, going to conferences (or the not doing so) felt quite high stakes. So I started to think about whether I could draw on what was immediately around me, as a kind of archive. The everyday stuff of my life, my feelings, of motherhood. Not to fulfill the institutional requirement that I publish, but instead, almost as a protest against the way I felt that valid research, and writing, and what “matters,” was measured.

The fact that I began to look a bit farther back into my life, and write about childhood loss, was partly because, on reading some early draft fragments, someone asked me what I was leaving out. And I came to realize that I was avoiding writing that kind of longer life narrative for fear of the overt or tacit institutional judgments that are directed against that “memoir” classification. Which then made me want to claim that very form.

ND: I want to sit for a bit with that anger you’ve just described. Anger at a kind of exclusion from the norms of academic life, which results from becoming a primary caregiver. Anger also, I’m guessing, at the imminent, high-stakes professional judgment about to happen to you.

And yet when I think about that anger and its place in your book, I’m reminded of one moment in it. You record a statement made to you, when you were younger, by an older lover, a photographer. As you put it: “One day, while fiddling with a lamp, you ask why I don’t write something people might actually want to read. Get to read.” It’s such a challenging, if also possibly wounding, thing to say to an aspiring academic; I can imagine it might’ve inspired its own kind of anger.

But was it also a moment of inspiration? A way to get past the inner academic voice saying “You shouldn’t do this,” but also to hear another inner voice wondering “Why not?”

SR: Sitting with anything isn’t something I do that well, Nick!

You’re right though. At the time I remember feeling quite challenged by that seemingly offhand remark. Quite defensive, I suppose, about the implicit binary here.

So academic articles, academic books, and also literary journalism got lumped into the “not something people read” category, as opposed to this other seemingly more valuable, more artistic, more popular, more likable output. At the time, part of me then felt—and still feels—that it’s all a continuum. That it’s all creative. That a whole lot of imagination goes into every review I write, every essay I mark.

(Still, there’s a risk, in this, of becoming a kind of parody. Like that professor in David Lodge’s campus novels who considers the exam papers that he writes as a kind of art form.)

But there was also a practical defensiveness in how I reacted to that pronouncement. After his question, I remember thinking: “Mate, it’s not that easy. I have to earn a living. I have to get a stable job. And jobs need peer-reviewed articles.” My defensiveness softened a bit in time. Eventually I heard his pronouncement differently. Not as deriding what I had done before, but as calling out something that had been in me all along.

Ultimately, the possibility of speaking boldly and expansively from the first person—or writing creatively, or poetically, without the shield or carapace of a critical persona—hit me when I hit 40. I remember thinking that I was terribly bored with feeling scared of what people and institutions might think of me, and rather tired of not taking risks. I felt less as if the book was something I was writing, and more that it was something I was making or crafting, quite playfully—I’ve always loved making things (as in objects), ever since I was a child—and was vaguely conscious that I had misplaced my conviction in that pleasure. Now, I was crafting something that I wanted to exist into being: both for myself, and for one particular imagined reader, a friend of mine, also a mother.

I came to realize that I was avoiding writing that kind of longer life narrative for fear of the overt or tacit institutional judgments that are directed against that “memoir” classification. Which then made me want to claim that very form.

ND: Speaking of making, you didn’t make or structure the book in any linear manner. Instead, it is written in flashes—scenic bursts, almost like snapshots—that alight at different moments in your life, or different places in it, including, very often, train journeys between places.

Why trains? Why so many moments of departure and arrival (and the space between them)?

SR: Train journeys were, primarily, a way for me to bring the three women of my book together, on parallel tracks. That’s to say, my journey about love, death, and marriage is entwined with the stories of two other women: Anna Karenina, who fictionally died, and Kate Field, who really lived. I needed a way to allow our experiences to echo and cross one another. It’s not an arbitrary device (trains being the end of Anna, and deeply important to me, and much dwelt on by Kate Field). But I did fret that any thematic device risks feeling—I’m not sure how to put it—overstylized? Especially a device as well worn, as iconic, as nostalgic, as the train.

And yet, perhaps that’s the point. I’m really interested in the way in which individuals find themselves falling into the expected pattern, into the cliché, so writing a book that leaned right into that very recognizable riff was important. The book did have an epigraph in its UK edition, from Louis MacNeice’s “Train to Dublin”: “For during a tiny portion of our lives we are not in trains.” I love that line, that idea of the betweenness, the gaps, the moments when our lives are improvised, escape pattern.

As for the structure more generally (and who better to talk to about divisions and structure): Well, I think that it was partly pragmatic. I couldn’t write long-form, continuous narrative, because I was writing in snatches. But in terms of a more feeling response—I’ve long been interested in the possibility, or not, of one’s life falling into a continuous narrative. Of the way we might long to live what Galen Strawson calls an “episodic” existence, but also resist it, and long to see that selfhood in long form. As a result, I can’t say that I actually chose the formal arrangement of the book, more that this formal arrangement was necessary.

When I first saw it in page proof, I was mildly horrified. Now, being mildly horrified by one’s book in proof is quite common. But my particular horror was related to this sense of flashing and glimpsing, which is even evident in the rhythm of the sentences, as well as the rhythm of the parts of the book itself. I had a desperate urge to rewrite the book in long, flowing chapters. That would be—I remember feeling—so much more natural, so much more authentic…

I have come to terms with it now. Of course, a limpid smooth narrative is just as much an artifice as a life story written in aphorisms. If it makes sense to say, it couldn’t have been written in any other way. It is an artifice that is as true as I could be—or the best shape that I could find—for the emotions about the rhythms of self and experience that I was trying to render.

ND: I’m glad you mentioned both Anna Karenina and Kate Field—two of your book’s crucial figures. The first is fictional, of course; the second is historical, if someone you had to reconstruct from a very partial archival record. And then there are the characters from your own life: your family as you knew it as a child, the figures of your romantic history, your family now. The book does a remarkable job of weaving these different categories together.

Does a certain kind of fictionality link all of them? How do you think about, let’s say, the ontological differences between these figures?

SR: I’m glad you asked, but to be honest this question throws me into a tailspin, because it feels so important to me. My doctoral thesis / first book was specifically about the ontological status of fictional characters. And that means that, in thinking this through, I have to untangle what past Sophie might have said from what current Sophie believes now. So, before answering your question, there’s the urge to go and reread the hundred or so articles that I’ve read on this subject over the years. That’s not either practical or desirable, and would certainly be achingly dull.

So I’m going to take your second question first, as it will shade into the first. I think about the ontological differences between these figures, partly, from a readerly perspective. When I’ve read memoirs that have analogous constructions to Loss, A Love Story—that’s to say, a braided memoir involving a construction of the present-day narrator and figures or figures from the past, either real or historical—I have a tendency to want to just skip the “old bits” and the “fictional bits.” I’m not proud of this habit, but I am interested in it, as I’m sure I’m not alone in this urge to “consume” that which feels nearest to some putative intimacy with the real (or “immediacy,” as Anna Kornbluh might put it). The urge to have “human interest,” which suggests that the story of Anna Karenina or Kate Field are farther away, ontologically, from both the “human” (and “interest”).

Part of the exercise in writing this was to disturb some of these ontological boundaries and categories. Firstly, I’ve tried to show the way that Anna Karenina was constructed, through Tolstoy’s imagination, from fragments of Trollope’s writing, which contain traces of the real Kate Field. And, in so doing, I’ve also endeavored to disturb the fictional/real boundary, just a little. And then, I also spend time in the book thinking through the way in which my rendering of my own character constructs herself from fiction (I, too, play at Anna Karenina, with elements of Madame Bovary).

There’s an epigraph in my first book from the philosopher Simone Weil—I won’t quote it in full but the bit that’s germane to this question is her suggestion that, in life, we should strive to accept that those around us are “other than the creatures of our imagination.” At a more fundamental level, I think that you are right in saying that a certain kind of fictionality links all the characters in the book: whether the character in question is the rendering of myself, my husband, my children, the “character” of a marriage or a family, or Kate Field, or Anna Karenina. But the ethical work of the book itself is in acknowledging that this fictionalizing—this rendering of others as “creatures”—is inevitable, tempting, and also a kind of ethical failure. That all these characters have their own being, which my single consciousness cannot catch, render, or ever fully acknowledge.

There are lots of shades here, depending on which character one is talking about. Still, I think the ethical strain is true in all cases.

A small afterthought. One thing I found particularly interesting and challenging was the attempt, and failure, to think back in time to Kate Field. I particularly struggle (don’t we all?) to realize individuals from the past, to feel for their once living, breathing sense in a more than half-hearted way. I felt quite distant from Kate all the way through writing the book. I struggled to find her dimensionality, and leave her at the end of the book in a train carriage “Kodak-distant, but still there.” “I wish I could touch her,” I write.

I got quite a bit closer to Kate on my recent visit to New York, when I went, for the first time, physically, to the places that I knew she had walked. I hadn’t been able to make that journey before. I had already retraced the steps of Anna Karenina, but not of Kate. That act of movement, paying tribute, felt important.

ND: I found exactly this aspect of the book—your investment in being there: revisiting the former sites of these lives, Anna’s and Kate’s and your own—genuinely moving. You go to Russia, to Leningradsky and Bologoye Stations; you go back inside your childhood home in Finchley, thanks to the generosity of its present owners; you even go back to the hospice where your father died.

I can imagine that there was a risk here, though, which is disappointment: the danger that there would be nothing there to be found, or sensed, or recovered. Did you sense this as a risk? Or would absence, erasure, failure, have been its own kind of story, one you might have been willing to tell?

SR: You’re right here. Despite my earlier protestations, I did, in fact, manage to do some research outside the confines of my own kitchen. I spent six days in Russia, and made a few day trips to London—all of which was eye-wateringly difficult to coordinate. And for that reason (and for the reason that I think is inherent in all research), I think I did sense this as a risk, maybe yes. That feeling of danger is always present, isn’t it, whether we are footstepping into a real historical past in an archive, or a place, or a biographical or imaginary pursuit.

On that note, here’s a picture of Bologoye Station, where Anna got off to meet Vronsky—I stuck my head out of the train to see if something amazingly romantic might happen.

Um, really not, as you can see from the scene.

But then again—actually, now I’m going to go back on myself—maybe there isn’t a danger after all. After all, I am so interested in feeling absence, in the overlooked textures of boredom and grayness and drabness. So if, as I did, when going back to any place, feel nothing, it is, by some sort of paradoxical sleight of mind, feeling something, as far as I’m concerned?

One thing that interests me, in thinking and writing, is trying to avoid the imperative that seems to govern the exercise when we think about it as research: that input must mean output, that hours spent traveling or reading must yield results.

This way of being does make things feel perilous, and stressful. I went to a wonderful talk by the scholar Catherine Clarke where she described a more play-based involvement with books and reading, connecting with the sort of magical thinking in relation to books and stories and the world around us, that we were used to practicing as children (and that occasionally we still practice as adults). In this sense, maybe I was (and am) up to the same thing in my writing, or try to be. In this way of thinking about writing, or research, there is no danger in not finding things, because the rules of the game mean that one will be seeking—and if one continues to not find what one is looking for, perhaps one can entertain the possibility that one is not the seeker after all, but hidden somewhere, waiting to be found.

ND: The book is in part an honest, wrenching account of your teenage response to parental loss. At one point you write that what might too easily be called self-destructive behavior—or a trauma response—was actually a perfectly reasonable desire to feel more, to have more life, to fill time up with life; what you call “the fiction of abundance.”

Is writing for you now an expression of something like that desire for “more life”?

SR: I think, Nick, it might be the opposite? The most precise though oblique way to explain how I feel about writing might be to just read the entirety of an essay by the poet Kay Ryan to you—it’s called “Notes on the Danger of Notebooks.” Here’s the beginning anyways.

Almost everything is supposed to get away from us. This is our grief. As a condition, it doesn’t have to be sad.

Ryan argues that we should be more “cavalier” about what we miss, what we can’t capture: “for of course it is only within the context of loss that anything can be said to be found.” So this is kind of the opposite of the Jamesian idea of trying to be the kind of person “on whom nothing is lost.”

So yes, I used to want to experience everything. I don’t anymore. And though I may always be drawn to it, I have given up on that “fiction of abundance.” I am, in fact, currently writing a fiction about abundance: a kind of anti-novel about an archivist who is a kind of monster, tacitly haunted by the ghost of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, who kept numerous notebooks.

Writing is for me an acknowledgment of the losing, the lessening, the thinning, that is less—but also more—because one is committing to a single line. It’s the opposite of opening that door to the affair, to multiple lives. Like a marriage, I guess?

The first thing I wanted to say in response to this, however, was: What is writing for you? Is it “more,” or “less”?

ND: More and more, I started to say—by which I really mean, the older I get—I side with muchness. As the pace of loss in one’s life starts to inevitably accelerate, and the paths not taken multiply, I think it’s harder to have patience with minimalisms, at least in the sphere of art. But I haven’t always thought this way.

It’s possible, though, that “more” and “less” is too abstract a way to put it. There’s the more pressing question of what you want to hold on to. Maybe this is the question I want to ask: Having written the book now, do you feel closer to those prior selves you write about, or was writing it a form of saying a kind of farewell to them?

SR: In the end, I’d say I feel closer to those prior selves, not because I’ve been able to say farewell to them, but because I have been able to look at them more closely, somehow. The subtitle of the English version of Loss, A Love Story was An Exhibition of Myself. The doubleness points, in part, to the deliberate feminist/political exposure of certain aspects of my self (here a nod to the artist Tracey Emin, and the singer P. J. Harvey). But it was also an act of curation. I feel as if I have, for myself, both honored those more difficult past selves, and placed them somewhere, where they are easier to manage. Yes, less in motion, somehow, like figures in glass boxes. So not a farewell—they’re still there. 

Featured-image photograph courtesy of Sophie Ratcliffe.