Maitland’s solitary lifestyle and increasing interest in silence meant that she became more attuned to the natural world: “I would go out into the garden at night or in the early morning and just look and listen: there were stars, weather, seasons, growth and repetition.”84 For the first time in her life she tended her own garden, finding sacramentality in its silent joy:
Gardening puts me in contact with all this silent energy; gardeners become active partners in all that silent growth. I do not make it happen, but I share in its happening. The earth works its way under my nails and into my fingerprints, and a gardener has to pay attention to the immediate now of things . . . In Warkton for the first time a garden became precious to me—it became an occupation, a resource and also my first glimpse that there might be art forms that I could practise that might not be made out of words.85
She became interested in “how gardens might reflect ideas, thoughts and desires, just as literature or painting does”86 and wrote a book about such gardens, along with the garden designer Peter Matthews, called Gardens of Illusion. Researching the book, she travelled around the UK, and, observing “the wild and desolate places that still . . . occupy a great deal of space in our supposedly overcrowded land,” such as the Pennines, the Lake District and the Highlands. In this she found that “it was not peace and contentment that I craved, but that awed response to certain phenomena of the ‘natural’ world . . . I discovered in myself a longing for the sublime, for an environment that, rather than soothing me, offered some raw, challenging demands in exchange for grandeur and ineffability.”87
Maitland became more interested in silence itself and contemplative prayer, and in 2000 decided to move to “the Huge Nothing of the high moorlands” of Weardale, in pursuit of “not just a greater quantity of silence, but also a more intense and focused experience of it.”88 Shortly after moving to the moors, she spent six weeks in isolation on the Isle of Skye: “[f]ascinated by silence, drawn joyfully into the void, I wanted to experience a total version.”89 Her commitment to silent living deepened, and her historical, literary, and theological research, as well as her own thought on the experience of silence, was published in 2008’s A Book of Silence. The book opens with Maitland “sitting on the front doorstep of my little house with a cup of coffee, looking down the valley at my extraordinary view of nothing,”90 feeling particularly satisfied because the previous day she had received the completion certificate for this house, that she had built on the moors of Galloway. On her website, she says, “[h]ere I write and pray and walk and am happy.”91
Maitland’s writing of her self is more prominent in non-fiction than in her novels or short stories; it is in Michèle Roberts’s fiction that I read a lot of fictionalizing of the author’s own life experience (hence this chapter’s section on Roberts is considerably longer than that on Maitland). However, one aspect of Maitland’s life that is employed in her novels and short stories is her voice hearing: from the 1980s onwards she experienced auditory hallucinations: voices which she knows are internal and “something to do with my imagination,” to which she gives descriptive names: “the Dwarf, the Angel, the Little Girl.”92 In A Book of Silence she writes, “I found the content of these voices more absorbing and engaging than tormenting, and they certainly never urged hideous actions upon me.”93 She does not believe in the existence of schizophrenia, thinking that “there must be something wrong, when people are unable to distinguish between Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper) and William Blake (who as a boy saw angels sitting in a tree on Peckham Rye, ‘bright wings bespangling every bough like stars’).”94 The voice of Angel is heard by characters in the novel Brittle Joys and in some of the stories of Angel and Me: Short Stories for Holy Week. The “collective voice I called the Godfathers and who seemed to represent a kind of internalised patriarchy”95 are put to direct use in Virgin Territory.
It is in another kind of voice that Maitland’s self is present in her fiction: her authorial voice, the writerly ‘I,’ is sometimes inserted into the story, particularly when she is engaging with the story of an other; for example “Triptych” in A Book of Spells or “Requiem” in Women Fly When Men Aren’t Watching. This is part of a practice of bringing the process of writing the story into the text itself; at the end of The Book of Spells is a non-fiction piece which begins with her discussing her feelings about the brief for the essay, and whether to write it or not.96 This device is also used in Arky Types, in which the ‘characters’ Sara and Michelene write to each other debating how to write a novel together. In Maitland’s writing in the first person, the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are blurred: “A Feminist Writer’s Progress” describes in story form her experience as a feminist writer, with a footnote that reads “[w]hether, and in what ways, you believe any of this is, of course, entirely up to you, but remember always that the writer is a writer of fictions and too literal or chronological a belief may prove dangerous to your health.”97 In the theological book, A Big-Enough God, she says of her account of becoming a feminist and a Christian, “I at least am convinced by my own narrative.”98
Although Maitland’s distinctive voice—witty, passionate, eccentric—is what makes her self so present in her writing, the personal narrative that has come to define her in recent years is her embracing of that which may seem antithetical to ‘voice’: silence. This is not just because her most extended work of life-writing, A Book of Silence, is a book about silence which interweaves her story with her thought and research on silence, rather than a straightforward autobiography, nor even because that book and Maitland’s discussion of it have proved so popular with the wider public. Rather, it is because Maitland has come to understand herself as a seeker of silence; the story of her life flowing towards silence. This has had interesting implications for her consideration of herself as a writer. During the last decade, she found that she was not writing fiction any more:
When I had come north it had been with a sense that the stories were not enough—I wanted to dig deeper into them, to pull more out of them. It had not occurred to me that I would abandon them, nor they me. The desire to write, to tell stories that pull my thoughts and emotions together, has been something that I have lived with and felt integral to my sense of well-being, even identity, for as long as I can remember. Now quite simply stories did not spring to mind; my imagination did not take a narrative form. I had in a peculiarly literal way “lost the plot.”99
Although Maitland has written a number of acclaimed short stories since embarking on a predominately silent lifestyle, she doubts that she will write another novel. Considering why this is, she notes that, historically, silent living has given rise to great poetry and non-fiction, but not to fiction, especially novels: “[p]erhaps it is because fiction involves creating whole new worlds and this requires a greater assertion of the ego than recording what comes, as a gift, into your own silent life.”100 On the other hand, the sense of self that comes across so