Yes. I think what one should say is that there have always been great women writing the English novel since it began, and it is different in that way from most other cultures' novels. But it makes peculiar problems for literary feminism in England, because people keep saying you have to prove yourself, and actually the novelists were there. It began with Jane Austen, there was George Eliot, there were the Bröntes. I grew up with Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, who were already working and were already successful.

I think what the father in "Possession" stood for was the fear of the goodness of good literature, this terror of the great past. Though I left it open as to how good a novelist the father was, I think he did represent the terror of everything that has been done when you're just starting, and the feeling, when you're a woman, that you start with one hand tied behind your back, despite George Eliot and the Bröntes and Iris Murdoch.

I think on some other level it's a novel about a kind of battle between D.H. Lawrence and (the famous literary critic) F.R. Leavis, about a battle between criticism and actually wanting to write. Because if you've come out of the university with an English degree, the desire to write, at least in my country, is quite heavily knocked out of you. You have become timid and afraid and overwrought, and also told constantly that it isn't your business. I had a supervisor of a Ph.D. I was doing in Oxford, and she said, "My dear, every young girl with a first class degree expects to be able to write a good novel. None of them can."

Is "Still Life" an answer to "Women in Love"? I know that you've described Lawrence as corrupt and seductive.

Well, we were fed Lawrence at Cambridge. I remember, I wrote an essay -- we had to write a three-hour essay as part of our finals -- and the subject I had to write on was "Is the novel the highest form of human expression yet attained?" This is a statement made by Lawrence.

I just lost my temper, and I wrote and wrote and wrote, and said "How can anybody be so blinkered?" There is science, there is philosophy, there is music, there is painting. How can anybody say that? Nobody can write a novel, I rather plaintively said, if there is that much weight put on The Novel. It's just like Lawrence to overstate to that extent. The novel as the one bright book of life -- it doesn't mean anything.

But nevertheless, he did sort of put a kind of Blakeian vision into a world I knew, into a world of chapels and of very, very cautious lower-middle class values, and people who wanted to get out of something that they didn't want to hate. And I did want to write it, in a sense, with the women at the center, though nobody could say that Ursula and Gudrun in "Women in Love" are not very powerful images of women. It wasn't corrective in that sense. It was really taking it on. One of the chapters in "The Virgin in the Garden" is called "Women in Love," but lots of the other chapters are named after Milton and Freud.

I also had the idea at that time I was very much defending realism against the rather trivial kind of experimental novels that were then going on in England. There was a very talented young writer called B.S. Johnson who is now dead, he killed himself, I think, at the beginning of the '70s. He was writing things like "James Joyce was the Einstein of the novel. It will never again be possible to give people names, or to write narrative that goes forward, or to describe things."

This just made me very angry, because it seemed to me that life was so varied and complex that it took up all your energy, and yours would never be the same as anybody else's description unless you were a bad writer. The only definition I give of how I know a novel is bad is: one, if it's derivative, totally derivative; and two, if the sentences are limp. I can't think of any other.