Xenobe Purvis: On the Specificity of Strangeness, the Wonders of Archival Research, the Violence of Patriarchy, and Her Debut Novel ‘The Hounding’

When I spoke to Xenobe Purvis earlier this summer, she was just a few weeks away from the UK release of her debut novel The Hounding (forthcoming in the US from Macmillan, 2025), which tells the story of five sisters and a vicious rumor, spread among the inhabitants of their small village, that the sisters have the ability to transform into dogs. It’s a smart, intricate novel, steeped in historical research while also being extraordinarily readable. I went into our conversation with a long list of questions about the novel and Xenobe’s career in literary research, as well as the balancing act that is writing seriously while also parenting a toddler. (We spent the first few moments of the call gushing about how fun it is to watch our sons discover language, and commiserating about how utterly unconducive toddler sleep habits are to any semblance of creative work.)

Even now, months after reading the novel, the landscape of the novel, an eighteenth century village on the Thames called Little Nettlebed, still feels vivid to me. Xenobe’s descriptions of its flora, fauna, and weather, and its inhabitants and their habits bring the novel to life. “Summer was the season of strangeness,” the book’s second chapter, which follows one of five third-person narrative perspectives, begins; just pages later, a monstrous water creature washes up on the banks of a river threatened by unseasonable heat. It’s a violent scene of destruction, a portent of stranger things to come, and also a gem of archival knowledge, borrowed from historical documents and woven into the story to invite readers into the taut, lovely, and uncanny world of the novel. The Hounding is a perfect book for the last torrid days of summer, for those who feel frustrated by the enduring destruction of patriarchy, for lovers of historical, lightly-speculative fiction and beautiful sentences, or for anyone who just wants to be transported to a strange and beautiful world for a little while. 

Corinne Cordasco-Pak: I would love to know, to start, about your writing routine. Has becoming a mother changed it at all?

Xenobe Purvis: When I’m writing, I try to commit to a routine. In my mind, I call it the Graham Greene routine: 500 words a day. I find that having the discipline and momentum to stick to that [number] is so essential for the long-distance undertaking of writing a novel. Whether they’re 500 very poorly written words at the end of an evening out, or fresh at my desk at the start of the day, that’s what I aim for. 

Having a child has taught me that time is very precious and expensive. I feel like I can no longer afford false starts, which is quite galvanizing. I do mourn the days where I would just, you know, disappear into a rabbit hole. In the sort of olden days, a thought would occur to me, and I’d think, “I need to read everything that’s ever been written about this thought.” Now, I don’t have time to luxuriate in that. But it’s good for focus. 

CCP: What other obligations are you balancing these days?

XP: Usually, my day job is in literary research. I am a freelancer, so it differs project to project. For a long time I’ve been working with this wonderful scholar of Christopher Isherwood called Katherine Bucknell. I was her research assistant on her recent biography of Isherwood, and I have done research for other academics and sometimes screenwriters, basically digging around in archives and finding lovely details. I’ve always found that that research coexists with fiction writing in quite a companionable way, especially with historical fiction. The disciplines inform each other. It’s as wonderful and interesting as it sounds, to be honest. 

CCP: That sounds like an ideal day job for a writer of historical fiction! Tell me about your writing process: how do you move a draft along?

XP: I start a writing session by taking a look at yesterday’s work, despairing a bit, polishing it a little, and then turning to today’s work. Then, at the end of a complete draft, I go back to the beginning for a ruthless edit. I’ll usually read the whole thing aloud, listening for false notes. Sometimes I will copy the entire manuscript paragraph by paragraph from one document into another. Anything that doesn’t feel solid won’t survive the migration. Editing is essential to me. I am not one of those prose writers who writes beautifully on the first go.

CCP: That’s surprising! There were so many absolutely gorgeous sentences in The Hounding. When do you start focusing on the line level? 

XP: I’m thinking about it from the beginning, but I find that those false notes are there from the start. Maybe I’m aware of them as I’m writing and thinking, well, I need to get my 500 words down today, but on a second look I make it feel as clean as possible. That’s not to say it needs to be spare; even if there is a sort of frilly adverb, I want to make sure it’s intentional.

CCP: There seems to be something magical about retyping a draft from one document to another.

XP: Yes, otherwise, sentences have a sneaky way of becoming camouflaged. Your mind gets so used to seeing them in the context of a paragraph that they become overlooked. So I think lifting each sentence out and really considering it means that it doesn’t get lost in the haze. That’s where the reading aloud comes in: you make it new somehow.

CCP: What non-writing things help you feel creative?

XP: I don’t think I could be a writer without being a reader first. Aside from writing, that is where I get my creative fulfillment. It feels like an imaginative act that brings me joy every day.

CCP: Are there any books that have made you feel inspired lately, or that you return to? 

XP: I read very widely—it’s hard to pick a good example. I just last week read The Safekeep. [It was] so good. And really so interesting about memory and inheritance and reckoning and love. I did feel, reading that, very excited about the possibilities in prose. I love anything that makes a central character out of the inanimate, like a home or a place. 

CCP: Let’s talk about The Hounding. I felt very similarly excited about it, especially as a debut. How has working toward its publication reshaped your writing goals? 

XP: I have been thinking about that a lot. At the start of a creative project, there’s that really tremendously exciting feeling when an idea occurs to you. Virginia Woolf described it as something like “the tug at the end of the fishing line.” Then, you’re really just holding your breath and hoping that you can pull it off. For me, success is the confidence that I have done what I set out to do, and I’m proud to feel as though I’ve achieved that with The Hounding. When I look back at my early notes, I can see it all there. 

Now, a new goal is—with luck—finding some readers. If it resonates with people, that would be unimaginably wonderful. I’m dipping my toe into interviews. I’ve got a few events over the summer, which is so exciting. It’s not my kind of natural way to be, so I’m finding my way into it.

As I tentatively embark on a new fiction project, I’m trying to keep in mind that measure of success, which is just trying to stay faithful to my idea, and not to let myself be swayed by too many concerns about anything beyond that. There has been so much excitement in the past couple of years, things I’ve only dreamed about. I do think that initial excitement of “Here’s something I want to commit to writing about for a few years” is hard to beat. 

CCP: Tell me more about the initial excitement of The Hounding. What drew you to this story and how did you start writing?

XP: It was quite a magical process actually. I say that with several years of un-magical attempts to write and publish novels under my belt. I came across the true story of five “barking” sisters in Oxfordshire in the 1700s, and that sparked the idea. From there, I did several months of reading around the subject, researching, lots of plotting and planning. The actual writing was fairly quick, because by then I was so familiar with the material. And also, frankly, the novel isn’t very long.

I was quite heavily pregnant when a publisher made an offer on the book, and then miraculously a few more offers followed. The final publishing deal was announced the week I gave birth, so it did all feel almost charmed. But I feel like I need to caveat that with a kind of apology. As I said, there were many failed attempts before this. So this instant just felt like everything miraculously fell into place. 

Beyond that, I thought I would hate the editing process and I really didn’t feel that at all. I so appreciated the really thoughtful input of my editors. And again, with copyediting, it sounds so painful, but I just found it completely delightful that someone cared as much as I did about the etymology of a word or “where should I put this comma?” So it has just been a joy. Also, I think for a person who is slightly anxious about putting work out there without having my full confidence in it, it’s so amazing to have those many rounds of edits.You can’t help but feel, at the end of that process, “Well, this is the best this text is going to be.” That’s really kind of calming, actually.

CCP: Were there any things that felt essential from that original story to bring forward into the novel or leave behind?

XP: I pursued the original story to its source, a letter written by the girls’ doctor, but, beyond that letter there wasn’t really any information about this case. So the writing was an imaginative exercise informed by a lot of research about that time period. I wanted to imbue the book with the texture of everyday life in the 1700s. I had this ambition that I would make it as legible as possible to a modern day reader, but I also wanted to create a feeling of historical foreignness so the reader would feel almost at a distance from the events that were happening.

In order to do that, I really wanted to insert into the narrative some of the very peculiar, eccentric, true things that I discovered in reading about the eighteenth century. So, for example, at the start of the novel, a giant water creature is stranded on the banks of the River Thames. That was taken from a true account. Halfway through the book, I describe how pregnant women were pallbearers for a friend of theirs who died in childbirth, which is a custom said to have been practiced in England at that time. These things felt, to me, stranger than fiction, so I really wanted to make sure they found a place in the narrative because they created this feeling of foreignness that I wondered if I would be able to fictionalize.

CCP: I was struck by that element of specificity in the novel: we didn’t just get descriptions of flowers and plants, we got their specific names. As you mentioned earlier with The Safekeep, the setting of Little Nettlebed seems like an essential element.

XP: I felt that a really effective way of communicating the feeling of foreboding that I wanted to create over the course of the novel was weaving it into the setting itself. So, for example, at the start of the book, we have this very lush summer landscape. Then, over the course of the novel, as this terrible heatwave takes hold we see the specific, named flowers wither and die. The ground becomes hard and parched and the river, which is so important to the plot, recedes. The specificity was very important to me as a tool for atmosphere, but also because I really appreciate those sorts of forensic details in things I read. 

CCP: I’m always drawn to more strange or speculative fiction, which I think in the UK is described more often as “uncanny.” It’s fascinating to me that some of the most surreal elements from the novel are the things most rooted in historical research. 

XP: I wanted to insert a suggestion of magic, but I didn’t give myself licence to make up moments like the giant water creature, or the ravens that nest on the roofs of people who are about to die. Those were taken from a contemporary source. I felt I really wanted them to be there. Uncanny is such a good word for it.

CCP: Do you have any advice for a writer who might want to incorporate more research into their writing?

XP: I think of it as foraging. I love to disappear into obscure contemporary sources and just see what I can find. I read kind of indiscriminately—obviously history books, but also lots of primary materials: diaries, novels from that time, poetry from that time. I wanted to try and take on as much information as I could about, as Hilary Mantel says, “the color of the wallpaper.” But, my advice on top of that would be: you might not ever need to mention the wallpaper. What I mean by that is, that you go into the writing with all this knowledge, but maybe the intention of holding some of it back so that the reader doesn’t feel overburdened, but feels confident that the knowledge is there somewhere just out of reach.

CCP: Another thing I’m very curious about is the polyphonic third-person narrative voice. How did that structure emerge?

XP: Alighting on the narrative voice was maybe the most important part of the writing process for me, so forgive me if this gets quite granular. While I was planning the novel, I was confronted by a very practical problem, which is that in order to preserve the central mystery about what was actually happening to the sisters, we needed never to access their perspective. I then toyed with the idea of a first person voice, possibly a character close to the sisters, but ultimately baulked at the prospect of writing the whole novel in an eighteenth century idiom. So then I settled on this close third person, which felt like the right balance between being coherent for a modern reader, but also having a suggestion of the time period as we dip into the characters’ thoughts. 

CCP: How did you decide who the speaking characters would be?

XP: I actually think the five characters kind of occurred to me almost fully formed. I don’t know if it was a matter of nominative determinism, but when I was researching the book, I found their names in various probate records from the time.

I liked the symmetry of having these five voices and then these five essentially voiceless girls at the center of the narrative. And, as I think I said, I couldn’t find out much about the girls from the doctor’s letter. But I did find a contemporaneous family of five sisters in the village in which they were living, so I took their Christian names for my characters. I liked the idea that they have this seal of authenticity.

CCP: Let’s talk about the ending without giving too much away! How did you decide where you wanted to end the novel and how did you know when you got there? 

XP: I knew that I didn’t want to supply all the answers, but I wanted to offer the reader some gratification. I admire novels that nod to a conclusion, but leave the reader with a feeling of uneasiness. We know that there’s something waiting in the wings. I think Daphne du Maurier does this so effectively in “The Birds.” It’s a complete masterclass in tension and suspense. At the end of the story, the protagonist is holed up in his house with his family, and in the very final lines he lights up a cigarette, which we know to be his last one that he was saving. And he flicks on the silent wireless. I love the fiction of alrightness, for want of a better word, because meanwhile the birds are gathering at the windows. It is so sinister and chilling, but it also feels like a good conclusion. I had that in mind while I was writing. I can’t claim to pull it off in such an extraordinary way, but the hope and the ambition were there.

CCP: In terms of influences, I’ve seen a lot of mentions of The Hounding alongside books like The Virgin Suicides. If The Hounding were on a bookshelf with the books that it most wants to be in conversation with, what would be on that shelf?

XP: A book like The Hounding unavoidably operates in the shadow of Angela Carter. Tonally it takes notes from writers like Shirley Jackson, who is such an incredible purveyor of the uncanny. I also think, in exploring the sometimes cozy, sometimes claustrophobic world of sisters, in my mind at least, it’s is in conversation with books like Little Women, and even maybe Pride and Prejudice, and as you say, definitely The Virgin Suicides. 

CCP: Were there any parallels that you found in publishing a book about the violence of patriarchy while also raising a son?

XP: The heartbreaking and damaging effect that our system of patriarchy has on boys as well, obviously, as on girls, was absolutely at the forefront of my mind while I was inhabiting the perspectives of the male characters in the novel, and yes, definitely at the forefront of my mind every day as the mother to a small boy. It’s alarming and disturbing, but I guess we have to try our best with the lessons we’re imparting. 

I wanted to give license to the idea that in a world’s society of strong men, boys can have permission to be gentle. That was something that really informed one of the characters, Robin, who is this very gentle boy in this very violent society. How would such a boy exist and thrive? Is it possible? It was very preoccupying for me as I was writing. I think historical fiction can be a very unsettling mirror in some respects.

CCP: To close, was there anything else that helped you build the stamina you needed to write and publish your debut novel?

XP: Sometimes I felt like the only person who wanted me to get to the end of this draft was me. I had to think “How can I be the one to keep myself going?” One feeling I did have, after a couple of failed attempts [at novels], was that this thing, which I thought brought me joy, was only bringing me pain. At that point, I put writing aside for a little while to return to this idea of, “well, what am I doing this for, and what excitement can I find in this?” After that, I felt like I was doing this for the joy of doing it, and not because it needed to meet with some specific outcome—which is sort of not true. I think you have to delude yourself and say, “This is just for fun. If it never becomes anything else, at least it was fun.” And then, you hope. It’s an endurance test, and we do it because we love it.

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Xenobe Purvis was born in Tokyo in 1990. She studied English Literature at the University of Oxford, has an MA in creative writing from Royal Holloway, and was part of the London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme. She is a writer and literary researcher, with essays published in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Magazine, and elsewhere.

Author photograph by Michael Guppy.