PHOTO: Jane Alison, acclaimed author and professor of creative writing, captured in a moment of quiet reflection.
Literary Innovation Through History, Myth, And Imagination
Jane Alison reflects on her novels, memoir, and literary theory, discussing architecture, classical influence, unconventional narrative structures, and the personal histories shaping her remarkable body of work.
Jane Alison has long been a writer of uncommon insight, weaving together history, myth, memory, and the intricacies of human relationships with a voice both lyrical and precise. Her body of work spans fiction, memoir, translation, and literary theory, each piece distinguished by a restless curiosity and an elegant command of form. Whether in the shimmering autofiction of Nine Island, the poignant family narrative of The Sisters Antipodes, or the inventive patterns explored in Meander, Spiral, Explode, her writing invites readers into new ways of seeing and experiencing story.
Her most recent novel, Villa E, turns its gaze on the charged and complicated relationship between architects Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier. Here, fact and fiction intertwine to reveal not only the external drama of art, architecture, and possession, but also the inner landscapes of desire, obsession, and memory. Alison’s gift lies in her ability to inhabit these lives with imagination while honouring their historical truths, creating a work that feels at once intimate and monumental.
A classical scholar as well as a novelist, she has consistently questioned inherited narrative forms, offering alternatives inspired by mosaics, spirals, meanders, and the organic structures of nature. This questioning spirit, alive in her fiction and critical writing alike, marks her as a writer who both reveres and reshapes tradition.
To encounter Jane Alison’s work is to be reminded of the deep ways in which stories shape us—through the lives we inherit, the myths we reimagine, and the structures we choose to tell them. It is also to be reminded of the courage it takes to tell one’s own story, whether through fiction, memoir, or translation, with honesty and imaginative boldness.
In Villa E, you explore the dynamic between Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier. What drew you to their story, and how did you approach blending historical facts with fictional elements?
I learned of the story almost twenty years ago, while living in Germany with my then-husband, a professor of urban design. He attended a lecture about Gray’s villa and came home saying, You would love this. The story intrigued me at once: Corb’s obsession with Gray’s house, his outrageous vandalism, and subsequent theft of it; the strangely indeterminate sexual undertones of what he did; a famous graphic of him painting her walls naked; the dark perfection of his swimming to his death in the cove below the house. The facts alone were compelling, and I stayed true to them. But for the gates of fiction to swing open, I needed to imagine as deeply as possible the interior life of each figure. I was most interested in how the events andconsequences lived inside the memoriesof both Gray and Corb (called Le Grand in the novel).
Meander, Spiral, Explode challenges traditional narrative structures. How did your background in classics influence your exploration of alternative storytelling forms?
That’s an interesting question. Central to my reading of classics wasGreek tragedy, from which modern fiction writers acquired the powerful notion of the “dramatic arc” as a model, or even the model, for storytelling. In it, a story develops tensions that reach a peak, explode, and then subside. It’s an excellent model for drama but, with its sexual notes of climaxing and subsiding . . . very masculine. My own first novel, The Love-Artist, about Ovid and his exile, followed this pattern more or less unquestioningly. But when I moved to the second novel I began to think of other forms that might capture a wider range of complex, polyvalent experience. Ovid himself worked with elaborate mosaic patterning in Metamorphoses, and I began to explore patterns derived not only from other art forms, like mosaic, but also from nature: spirals, meander, networks. Almost twenty years after I first began writing fiction, I coalesced these ideas about natural form for narrative in Meander, Spiral, Explode.
Your memoir, The Sisters Antipodes, delves into a unique family dynamic. How did your upbringing shape your perspective on relationships and storytelling?
When I was four, my parents (Australian diplomats) met another couple (American diplomats) and very quickly traded partners. My father went off on his career with his new American wife and her two little girls, while my new stepfather set off with my mother, sister, and me. Four seven years these two mirrored families shadowed each other on opposite sides of the globe. We took our new father’s name and nationality, while far away the invisible others took ours. We didn’t see the other family all that time. There were letters, though—and lots of imagining, longing, and jealousy. It seemed to me that we had been neatly replaced; my counterpart stepsister even had my birthday and almost my name. When we finally met, I was eleven and felt I was in a crucial battle to be seen by own father. A long adolescent struggle began, one that ended tragically. The story of my overly symmetrical family was something I’d often presented as a sort of identity card, and when tragedy ended it, I was finally able to write it and give it real thoughtfulness, form, and depth. Also crucial was telling my version of this life asa counternarrative to strong parental versions.
In Nine Island, the protagonist contemplates withdrawing from love. What inspired this theme, and how does it reflect your own experiences or observations?
Nine Island is a “nonfiction novel”: everything in it was drawn closely from life. There was a year when, living alone in Miami, I did contemplate withdrawing from love—yet I was surrounded by the wild and very visible eroticism of Miami Beach. At the same time, I was translating Ovid’s stories of sexual encounter, so my inner faux-celibacy crashed into external eroticism both real and imagined, and everything came together to make me create something.The novelistic inventiveness came not in imagined incidents but in form: having chapters that might just be a line each, including passages from my imagined Ovid, etc.
Your translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Change Me brings ancient stories to a modern audience. What challenges did you face in maintaining the essence of these myths?
Not many! But only because I first read those stories—specifically, of often painful sexual encounter—when I was nineteen, and they seemed to me like my fraught young life translated into dream sequences. I’ve loved stories like Echo and Narcissus, Pygmalion, Myrrha, and Hermaphroditus for decades and have always wanted everyone to read them. It can be challenging for modern readers to move through Ovid’s whole book, Metamorphoses, though, so I selected stories and reassembed them. Some of the nomenclatures in the original can detract from the stories’ sense of timelessness, so I made light changes: instead of “nymph,” for instance, which can connote a lot of gauziness, I often said “girl.” A little cheating.
As a professor of creative writing, how do you incorporate your own literary experiences into your teaching methods and interactions with students?
I teach books, stories, and essays whose form and content excite me, often texts that are inspiring my own work at the time. You can’t teach creative writing unless you’re actively engaged in the practice, as with any art instruction; you need to have followed those paths of writing a novel or memoir to help others just setting out.
Villa E is set in the French Riviera, a region known for its artistic heritage. How did the setting influence the narrative and character development in your novel?
Villa E was spawned entirely by the real house it’s about—Villa E.1027—and by the woman who made and loved it and the man who co-opted it. Not just the house, but the piece of land where Gray built the house, all of which she loved and let infuse her: the rocky promontory, pebbled cove, lush green landscape, towering Alps where they meet the sea. The sounds of waves on pebbles, cicadas, clouds rolling over—all of it was essential.
What advice would you offer to aspiring authors seeking to develop their unique voice and narrative style?
Read as widely as possible, especially work that does not follow mainstream, commercial norms. Read ancient poetry, foreign fiction. Look at art and nature and gardens and creatures and let them inspire you, too. Language, literature, and song are most singularly human: let your words be original and wild.
