Jessie Burton: How the success of The Miniaturist made me a nervous wreck

Two years ago The Miniaturist flew to the top of the bestseller list, but for its author Jessie Burton its success was hard to live with.
Author Jessie Burton.Author Jessie Burton.
Author Jessie Burton.

Just three years ago, Jessie Burton was a struggling actress and unpublished writer, who could not have imagined what it would be like to become a bestselling novelist. The Miniaturist changed all that.

Her story of a young woman in 17th century Amsterdam, who is given a miniature replica of her home by her new husband and begins to see the dramas of her household mirrored in it attracted a frenzied bidding war, which ended with Burton clinching a a six-figure sum deal for her debut.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Since then, The Miniaturist, published in 2014, has been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than a million copies worldwide. It also changed Burton’s life. While she still lives in the same one-bed flat in East London, she admits she found it difficult to cope with the inevitable attention success brought.

“I don’t know that I coped that well in the first half of last year. I was anxious and discombobulated by it all,” she continues. “The only thing that saved me, was writing the second book and having my friends and family who knew me from before, so it wasn’t just ‘Jessie Burton the writer’.

“It manifested itself in terms of anxiety and worry, which is really sad, but I’ve since spoken to other people, and I read a piece by Hilary Mantel who said that winning the Booker is a crisis.”

Burton’s second novel couldn’t be more different to the first. The Muse, explores London’s Trinidadian community in the Sixties through the life of its Caribbean protagonist, would-be writer Odelle Bastien, who gets a typing job in an art gallery and embarks on a relationship with a young man who has inherited a mysterious painting, which her boss believes is a masterpiece by a Spanish artist.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The mystery of the painting’s provenance is slowly unveiled in the novel’s other time frame, Southern Spain in 1936, at the start of the civil war, and Burton’s dual narrative reflects hidden creativity in both literature and art.

“It was quite a pressure to write The Muse. Not so much in that I had to replicate the success of The Miniaturist, I never worried about that because every book is different. My job is to write a story that I think readers will love. But my identity and my sense of self was fractured slightly by the unexpected success of The Miniaturist, so that made it harder to be sure of myself, in a paradoxical way.”

Burton - whose father Edward is a retired architect-turned-ceramic restorer and mother Linda is a retired teacher - grew up in Wimbledon. She pursued acting after university, with limited success.

“I was highly ambitious and demanding on myself, and I wanted to play bigger parts on bigger stages and it wasn’t happening. By the age of 27, I’d waited 12 months for a job and I was struggling to find joy in it.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Her main source of income while ‘resting’ was as a PA in the City. She temped for eight years after leaving drama school, which kept the wolf from the door. She also attended a creative writing course run by literary agent Curtis Brown.

The TV rights of The Miniaturist have been sold to the production company which made the award-winning Wolf Hall, and Burton is executive producer, although she sees her involvement as limited.

“I’ll be meaningfully consulted, but if I throw my toys out of the pram, they’ll leave me in the pram. I’d love to be in it, but not as one of the main parts, maybe just a sugar seller in the corner, or a crone in the market place.”

Now that she’s a literary success, however, she suspects her acting career may be over.

“The world of writing seems to be a lot more welcoming to me than the world of acting.”

The Muse by Jessie Burton is published by Picador, priced £12.99. Available now.

Related topics: