Diane Setterfield, highly acclaimed new author, admits that she misses writing. Strange, but the fact is she no longer has the time to do the thing that has made her famous.
"I'm really not used to being so busy," she says, sitting down to a cup of green tea in the bar of a hotel in Harrogate where earlier that morning she had been giving yet more interviews.
It is not the sort of schedule the former French teacher is used to.
"I'm used to living a really quiet life with lots of space to think. I'm not used to being so busy and social and meeting all these people. It's not that I'm anti-social, just that I like my own company, and I've been living with people who aren't real for the past few years – I find real people a lot more demanding."
Diane's debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, tells the story of famously reclusive novelist Vida Winter. She decides, for the first time in decades after a lifetime of lies and fabrication, that she wants to tell the truth about her life, and summons biographer Margaret Lea, a quiet woman who prefers books to people, to tell her story. Diane, who lives in Harrogate with her husband, says it took her five years to go from the point of having the idea for the novel to finishing it and it had taken her even longer to feel able to write at all.
"I thought authors had to be orphans, or have a drug problem, or be out having lots of sex – and none of those things were me!" says Diane. "Once I realised that the only difference between everyone else and writers is that they write, I felt I had cracked it."
So, five years after starting, her debut novel is now on the shelves. It is still too early to properly judge the audience reaction to the book, but the publishing world has already decided that it was well worth the wait. After being taken on by the first agent she sent her manuscript to, Diane found herself with a publishing deal from Orion worth a reported £800,000 and a US deal for more than $1m.
Despite these new-found riches, Diane appears level-headed and seemingly unchanged. There have been no extravagant purchases and she only recently gave up teaching.
"I teach people who are going to live abroad, so there was a natural winding-down process, and my last group finished just a month ago," she says, almost wistfully.
Surely something must have changed? After some thought, Diane admits that she has a cleaner and no longer does the washing up at home – although even this is something she appears almost melancholic about.
"I do miss the washing up – it was part of my quiet afternoon time when I was allowed to think," she says, adding: "I do miss writing very badly."
Diane's extraordinary journey began when she left academia, where she specialised in the works of André Gide and other 19th and 20th century French writers, in the late Nineties.
Although she enjoyed teaching, she hated university politics and after five years was still working to pay off the loan she had taken out to fund her PhD. "I gave up my job to write before I knew what I wanted to write about," she says. "It might seem bold or brave, but really it comes down to how much you want to do something. If you want to do something so badly, then you have to take a bold decision."
And so the aspiring writer left her stable job in order to write full-time – and promptly did anything but.
"I was so tired after leaving academia – I worked very hard for the final year of my job because I wanted to leave everything done right – that I just wanted to do something physical and use a completely different part of my brain," says Diane.
So, much of her first year as a novelist involved stripping paint from window frames, peeling wallpaper and teaching French privately.
"I was doing a lot of physical work, it was enormously good for me to be away from pen and paper, it enabled me to just wander in my thoughts and let a different side of my mind take over," she says.
"If I hadn't had the time to do that, I don't think I would have been able to write the same book I did."
When she finally sat down to write, it was a mystery novel in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith, with mornings spent at the computer, afternoons doing "something quiet, to have some thinking time" and teaching French in the evenings. It was during one of those quiet afternoons that she hit on the idea of Mrs Winter, who would become a central character in the finished story.
"I suddenly had this voice in my head," she says. "I wish more writing was like that, it was just one of those inspirational moments. I raced home, scribbled down the idea and put it in a drawer."
It stayed there for another year, until Diane had found more characters to join Miss Winter. She set about a first draft, but when it was completed 18 months later, she was unhappy with the finished manuscript.
"The biographer, Margaret, was very quiet and reserved and she was very difficult and withdrawn," she explains, talking about her as if she were a real person. "I could tell she was hiding something from me, but I couldn't tell what it was.
"I got very annoyed with the book and the characters, and didn't do anything for a year. After that I took a deep breath and sat down with it again. I couldn't leave it alone – I just felt these characters deserved to have their stories told."
It took another 18 months to finish the book, but once it was done, things began to move lightning-fast.
She sent the book out to agents in November last year, the first one took her on, and her book was published within a year.
"I am surprised by the reaction and amazed at how quickly it has all happened. I love book groups, and my friends are avid readers and I knew I was writing a book that I would like to read, but I didn't know how many people would like to read it – I still don't. I have been surprised at how enthusiastic the industry has been," she says.
"While I was writing, the vogue was for novels that were very gritty and realistic about things like drugs, I suppose that started with Trainspotting, or big books about multi-culturalism like Zadie Smith's White Teeth. I looked at my book and just thought that it was terribly English."
Comparisons have already been made to the works of the Brontës, and Orion's editor-in-chief, Jane Wood has said: "The book marks a return to that rich mine of storytelling that our parents loved and we loved as children." Perhaps the Englishness of the work of a French teacher from Harrogate is no bad thing.

• Diane Setterfield is one of the guests at the Yorkshire Post Literary Lunch on Thursday at the Majestic Hotel. Tickets on 01423 772217.

• The Thirteenth Tale is published by Orion and costs £12.99. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or online at www.yorkshirepost bookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is £1.95.