In brief: It was at the graveside that the book began. So many urged him to write it – ‘if not you, then who?’ And indeed someone would write a biography, and it was surely better that it was someone as close as him, rather than a stranger. So the biography of Jennet Mallow was conceived – and it would be a biography with all the colours of her paintings. If it was to tell the story of her life, it must tell it fully, and not be afraid of the consequences.

The Blue Mountains of Jamaica had been the backdrop of Lorna’s childhood, and when she gave birth to Jennet in 1924 she still thought of it as home – indeed she always would. A cold rectory in Yorkshire was not what she’d envisaged when she married Richard Mallow in 1917. Lorna and her mother had returned to England after the death of her father, and when her brother was killed at Ypres, the Jamaican home was lost. Lorna had met Richard at a Christmas party, and she saw an easy way to security through this seasoned professional soldier. He wouldn’t survive the war – all of the other men in her life had died, after all – and she’d be able to go back to Jamaica. So when he eventually returned, it was something of a shock. It was even more of a shock when Richard turned away from his career in the army and became a clergyman. Brief dreams of a rarefied life in Lambeth Palace were quickly swept from Lorna’s mind, as she ended up in the tiny parish of Litton Kirkdale in the upper valley of the River Aire. This was the home where the future star of the art world was born. The odd thing was, despite hating the cold and the rain and yearning for her Jamaican world, something of Litton Kirkdale must have touched Laura, for she named her new daughter after a local waterfall – Jennet.

There was a whitewashed patch behind the headboard of Jennet’s bed. She’d squeeze between the bed and the wall with burnt sticks salvaged from the fire to draw. She saw her drawings move in her dreams: a stretching cat, or a skein of geese. When her mother found the drawings she was angry, but she also bought Jennet a box of coloured pencils; and changed her life.

The dead bird might have been a goldfinch. Jennet couldn’t really tell as she sat drawing in the Kensington School of Art years later. All she knew was that this rather sad object was nothing like the wild birds with soaring wings she had in mind. Well, one day she would draw them. It was then that Jennet noticed David Heaton’s mocking smile. Come to the Black Prince with me and you’ll learn far more, he said, holding out his hand. And Jennet’s life turned again. A smoky pub with David’s friends, then a walk to a tall, thin house near Marble Arch. Don’t go home, he said, his friend Corinne had plenty of beds. Later Jennet sneaked across the landing to the bathroom, looking in the mirror for new-found maturity – but she saw no change. Even later, lying next to David, she kept her eyes closed to avoid looking at Corinne, who had pushed open the door to stare at David while he slept.

The portrait she painted of herself looking in that mirror is still probably the best-known image of her, and the extraordinary painting she produced at the same time, a luminous rectangle of bluish-white, won her that year’s Whistler prize. And she was on her way. Mirrors and glass, always looking out or back. Her way would be far from smooth, but the paintings would be extraordinary.

The story behind An Equal Stillness

“An Equal Stillness is my first novel, but it grew out of years of writing and of wondering what lay behind my own desire to write. In it I tried to make a life in words but also a life’s work. The main character, Jennet Mallow, is a painter, and her paintings are an important part of the novel, each one reflecting her development, what is happening, and where she is. I am not a painter myself but I love looking at paintings and sculpture. Writing about painting was a way of thinking about the sources of creativity and how events in life find their way into art. It also gave me a reason to read widely, and pleasurably, about art and twentieth-century British artists. The challenge I set myself was to make vivid on the page what would normally be seen on a gallery wall, to communicate directly to a reader’s eye.

Expressing a life in visual terms gave me space to write about intriguing things: the importance of place and landscape, the challenge of emptiness, the value of seeing things clearly and then describing them as truthfully as one can. Jennet lives and works in different places – London, Cornwall, southern Spain, west Yorkshire – each with its own special quality of light, each finding its way into Jennet’s painting and allowing me the pleasure of imagining them intensely. They are all places that are important to me, and to the real artists who inspired the novel. Although Jennet Mallow is completely fictitious, the artist I had most in mind when I was writing was Barbara Hepworth, a brilliant example of a woman who achieved great things while bringing up children and struggling with relationships. As a mother, I know that children, especially when still young, can soak up all the energy a woman might otherwise pour into work.

I didn’t set out only to explore abstractions. An Equal Stillness is also a story about love – love between child and parent as well as between man and woman. Jennet’s first love is another artist, David Heaton. Gifted, mercurial, handsome and drunken, like Jennet’s father a survivor of war, David is not an ideal husband. Yet Jennet goes on loving him all her life – as she does her fragile daughter, her peevish mother, the son she gives away – in ways that show that love in real life is more complicated than it may sometimes seem in fiction. Jennet Mallow is a painter, yes. But I meant her story to be true for anyone who has ever tried to do or make or say something, or to love, against the odds of life’s demands and the vagaries of fate.”

Francesca Kay

For discussion

• Is someone close to the subject the best person to write a biography?
• ‘Description is revelation of a sort.’ How?
• ‘There never was a picture worth a life.’ What does this tell us of Jennet?
• ‘She had to find out for herself just how much truth, and how much pain, could be expressed in colour and light.’ What did Jennet find out?
• Why windows and mirrors? Bars and grids?
• How does the author deal with the sense of place in An Equal Stillness?
• ‘Adulthood, she realised, was not absolute, but usually contingent on the point at which a person stood.’ Is it? Why does Jennet think this?
• ‘To look and to possess. The ambiguous relationship between the image and its watcher.’ How does the author explore this?
• ‘Solitude is easy when you are young.’ Why does it change?
• How is the sense of space dealt with in An Equal Stillness?
• ‘She believed the singularity of an image was important.’ What do you think? Do you agree with Jennet, or are you with Warhol?
• ‘The old must be content with memories of pleasure: its keen edge is for the young.’ Do you agree? How has the author dealt with an ageing character?
• Why is the novel titled An Equal Stillness?

Suggested further reading:

One Morning Like a Bird by Andrew Miller
Trespass by Valerie Martin
What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Purple Cane Road by James Lee Burke
An Equal Music by Vikram Seth