• Source: Sara Maitland

      • Sara Maitland (born 27 February 1950) is a British writer of religious fantasy. A novelist, she is also known for her short stories. Her work has a magic realist tendency.


      Life and career


      Sarah (later "Sara") Louise Maitland was born in London as the second of six children of Adam Maitland of Cumstoun House, Kirkcudbright, (a descendant of the judge Thomas Maitland, Lord Dundrennan) and Hope Baillie Maitland (née Fraser-Campbell). Adam Maitland's mother, Cecil Louise, was from the Scottish family of Mackenzie of Portmore descending from Colin Mackenzie of Portmore, friend of Walter Scott. Maitland has described her upper-class London family as "very open and noisy". In her childhood she went to school in a small Wiltshire town and attended St Mary's, a girls' boarding school in Calne, from the age of 12 until her admission to university. Maitland thought this school a terrible place and became very excitable.
      Growing up, Maitland developed a wild reputation: in 1966 she scandalised one of her brothers by winning a foot race in a very short cotton dress. On entering Oxford University in 1968 to study English, she became friends with future US President Bill Clinton and a regular visitor at 46 Leckford Road, a house Clinton shared with Frank Aller, David Satter and Strobe Talbott. She suffered from problems of mental disarray and inability to carry out routine tasks. During her college years, Maitland was taken to a mental hospital on several occasions for this reason, but she completed her course and started writing.
      She has been absorbed in religion since 1972. From 1972 to 1993 she was married to an Anglican priest, but divorced in 1993 and became a Roman Catholic. In 1995, she worked with Stanley Kubrick on the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
      She has two adult children. Since her son left college, Maitland has moved towards a solitary and prayerful life in a variety of locations, first of all on the Isle of Skye and ultimately in her present house in Galloway. She says that she wants to avoid most of the comforts of life, especially those that intrude into her quest for silence such as mobile phones, radio, television and even her son. She has described these changes in her life and the experiences leading to them in the autobiographical A Book of Silence. Maitland has taught part-time for Lancaster University's MA in Creative Writing and is a Fellow of St Chad's College, Durham University.
      Maitland's 2003 collection of short stories, On Becoming a Fairy Godmother, is a fictional celebration of the menopausal woman, while the title story of 2008's Far North was originally published as "True North" in her first collection Telling Tales and was made into a film of the same title in 2007. The rest of Far North collects dark mythological tales from around the world.


      Bibliography




      = Novels

      =
      Daughter of Jerusalem, 1978 (winner of Somerset Maugham Award 1979)
      also published as The Languages of Love
      Virgin Territory, 1984
      Arky Types, 1987 (with Michelene Wandor)
      Three Times Table, 1991
      Home Truths, 1993
      published as Ancestral Truths in the United States
      Hagiographies, 1998
      Brittle Joys, 1999


      = Short story collections

      =
      Telling Tales, 1983
      A Book of Spells, 1987
      Women Fly When Men Aren't Watching, 1992
      Angel and Me (for Holy Week), 1996
      On Becoming A Fairy Godmother, Maia, 2003
      Far North & Other Dark Tales, 2008
      Moss Witch, 2013


      = Non-fiction

      =
      A Map of the New Country: Women and Christianity, 1983
      Vesta Tilley, Virago, 1986
      A Big-Enough God: Artful Theology, Mowbray, 1994
      Virtuous Magic: Women Saints and Their Meanings (with Wendy Mulford), 1998
      Novel Thoughts: Religious Fiction in Contemporary Culture, Erasmus Institute, 1999
      Awesome God: Creation, Commitment and Joy, SPCK, 2002
      The Write Guide (with Martin Goodman), New Writing North, 2007
      Stations of the Cross (with Chris Gollon), 2009
      A Book of Silence, Granta, 2008 (hardcover); 2009 (paperback)
      Gossip from the Forest: the Tangled Roots of our Forests and Fairytales (ISBN 9781847084293), Granta, 2012
      How to Be Alone, in The School of Life series (ISBN 9780230768086), Picador, 2014


      = As editor

      =
      Very Heaven: Looking Back at the 1960s, 1988
      The Rushdie File, 1990 (with Lisa Appignanesi)


      Notes


      Sage, Lorna, ed. (1999). "Sara Maitland". The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 414. ISBN 9780521668132. maitland.


      References




      External links


      Official website Archived copy, 30 March 2022
      Sara Maitland at British Council: Literature
      Orlando Project

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