A plain and bookish young woman is approached to write the story of the life of Vida Winter, England's most famous—and notoriously eccentric—living author. And so The Thirteenth Tale begins. Partly an ode to the beauty of reading and partly a ghost story on par with Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Diane Setterfield evokes leathery tomes, foggy moors, and faint footsteps and giggles in her brilliantly haunting debut.

You craft a marvelous ghost story. Were such stories of interest to you when you were growing up?

Diane Setterfield: I was an avid reader as a child (still am for that matter), but oddly, I don't remember reading many ghost stories. I did once read a book about werewolves though. The story burned into my brain, and I would have done anything to be able to forget it. For weeks I was scared at night. So maybe I avoided frightening books after that.

By the time I was in my teens I was made of (slightly) tougher stuff. I started reading Edgar Allen Poe, and at about the same time I discovered M.R. James's marvelous ghost stories. Then there was Rebecca, which I found fabulously spooky, and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White.

But more than ghosts per se, what fascinates me persistently in life and in my reading—and this is a key element in The Thirteenth Tale—is the shadow the past casts over the present. We are all haunted by memory, past events, the selves we once were? And writing about ghosts is a good way of bringing these themes into focus.

England is traditionally a very haunted place. Do you suppose that the long history and connection to the past makes one more receptive to believing in and seeing ghosts? Is it part of the British collective consciousness?

DS: Are we British more prone to seeing and believing in ghosts because of our history? If it is so—and I'm not sure it is—then I wonder whether it has something to do with the architecture? When I went on family holidays as a child we often used to visit stately homes. I loved the creaky floorboards, the never-ending corridors, the forbidding turrets and towers. Inside were dark portraits of forgotten ancestors, moth-eaten curtains, walls of old books behind glass? Everywhere in such houses the past was present. And these houses always had their ghost. I remember vivid fragments of one such story: a gruesome tale of a baby being tossed into the hearth to burn. I wish I could remember more about it, but I think I was too horrified to take it in. I remember just staring, outraged, at the vast fireplace and, later, concocting stories in which I carried out some daring rescue of the mother and child.

I read that you have been teaching French and studying André Gide for the past two decades. The Thirteenth Tale is purely a return to your Anglo roots; it seems to almost be an homage to such great storytellers as the Brontës, and even Henry James with your wicked plot twist.

DS: Yes, The Thirteenth Tale is in many ways a very English book. When I abandoned my academic career I was feeling jaded, and I think there was a conscious decision at the outset not to bring my specialist French knowledge to the writing desk (though see the next question). This wasn't a once and for all decision, only a way of marking a break between two different ways of life.

In my university job there had been precious little time for reading for pleasure, and what little I did was mostly in French. So when I left academia, famished, I gorged myself on English novels of all kinds, and as I did this, I began to feel all my old reading stirring in me again. Little by little, these old loves found their way to the edges of my writing mind, and then into the book itself.

The word homage was frequently on my mind as I wrote, and sometimes it worried me. I wondered whether my book would seem old-fashioned in an age where recalling the classics is frequently done in an analytical way, or ironically, or with some modern slant. My referencing of the Brontës, Henry James, and the others was done in a different spirit entirely: with the fervent love of the passionate reader. But in the end, I just had to trust that there were enough people out there who would recognize their own passion for reading reflected in my book, and that this portrayal of the reading experience itself would be the originality of The Thirteenth Tale.

And where does your French teaching and scholarship show itself in your work?

DS: Despite my early intentions of closing the door (temporarily at least) on my French studies background, there are instances where I can spot the influence of my years of French scholarship. This isn't really surprising: you don't study something for two decades without it getting under your skin. There are moments in the book, for example, where I can hear rhythmic echoes of André Gide's prose. This was never deliberate, yet I am very pleased about it: it is an homage of a different sort.

Also I can cite Margaret's interest in the Landier brothers. This is a name I invented, but I had in mind the Goncourts, a pair of literary brothers in the Paris of the nineteenth century. In fact, for the French edition of Le treizième conte, we are talking about the possibility of replacing Landier with Goncourt.However, the main influence, I think, is that of the story within the story. Gide was a great one for writing about writers and finding ever more ingenious ways of incorporating their fictions within his own. I share his fascination with this kind of Chinese box effect (it's called mise en abyme, and it was Gide who coined the term), but wanted to use the device in a more traditional mystery narrative, hence the missing thirteenth tale, which gives my book its title and is a recurring motif in the novel.

This book is as much a love story about books as it is a ghost story. Your descriptions of Margaret's father's bookstore, of the smell and texture of a book, of the experience of reading a dead writer back into existence are very, very sensual. Does this in any way mirror your own experiences during your years of research?

DS: Not just during my years of research, but all my life. I fell in love with reading early, and it has provided many of the most profound joys of my life. Of course, the essence of a book is the experience it gives you when your eye passes over the lines of words inside, and your brain transforms the resulting electrical impulses into words, then phrases, then a world. The intimacy of this experience—when two imaginations, the writer's and the reader's, touch and make actual what was previously only potential—is utterly miraculous. The books themselves are the gateways to this magical experience. They are the only aspect of those imaginary worlds that is visible in ours, and that is why I get so hooked on their look, smell, texture. I love fonts (there is one I especially love right now, called Mrs. Eaves). I love the grain of different kinds of paper. I share Margaret's love of a well-ordered bookshelf.

I'm really pleased with the jacket of The Thirteenth Tale. That pile of books, with their marbled blocks of pages, their leather covers, their battered corners really captures the essence of Margaret's father's bookshop. The books seem so real you could almost smell them!

Are you a twin? There's quite a bit of philosophizing in your book about the completeness of twins.

DS: I'm not a twin, though there are twins in the family. My maternal grandfather was a twin, and he also had twins. I don't think these examples were on my mind when I was writing, though. In each case, the twins were boy/girl pairs, unlike in the book.

The reason I'm so interested in twins is because they make a good focal point for so many questions about identity. What makes me me? Where is the boundary between myself and others? Am I the sum of my genetic/biological material, or am I something else as well? Margaret is a bereaved twin, and this allows me to explore in the book questions about the nature of bereavement and the relationship between the dead and the living.

All of what you call the "philosophizing" about twins is done through the characters themselves. Hester and the doctor apply what they consider to be scientific thinking to the question of the twins, though their blindness to their real motives undermines the validity of their experiment. The Missus, though she is uneducated and unschooled, understands instinctively how twinness makes the world seem strange to her charges, and she responds with humanity and compassion. Margaret's response to the twins is filtered through her own experience of twinness. In Angelfield village, twinness is associated with the supernatural. So all the time I have tried to show the twins not directly, but through the other characters.

When the twins fall under the microscope of Hester and the doctor in the name of science, it seems contra nature. There is a distinct science vs. nature debate here, reminding me of e.e. cummings's "O sweet spontaneous/earth." Did you employ this as literary convention to mimic your predecessors in this genre?

DS: Along with Miss Winter (see the next question), Hester was the other figure who appeared to me from the very start as fully formed. I never meant her to be so important—it surprised me the way she just flowed onto the page, always knowing what she wanted, and driving the narrative by her sheer force of character. I like her because she made writing those passages of the book easy! (Margaret, on the other hand, gave me no end of trouble.) In fact, there was never any conscious intention on my part to draw that classic science vs. nature debate into the book. In the back of my mind were the Victorian notions of progress, the power of knowledge, the perfectibility of humanity through intellectual effort, but to be honest, mostly I was just trying to type fast enough to keep up with her.

Did you base Vida Winter's character on anyone in particular?

DS: In terms of Miss Winter's appearance, I frequently had in mind those photos taken of Colette when she was growing old. Her tight copper curls, heavily made-up white face, and plucked, arched eyebrows certainly gave me the boldly eccentric and artistic image I was after.

The other influence was Patricia Highsmith's Ripley—but this was very indirect. I had been considering what it must be like to know oneself to be one kind of person, whilst consistently giving in public the impression of being an entirely different kind of person. I was moved by the loneliness a person such as Ripley might feel, and in one of those exhilarating rushes of inspiration (I wish there were more of them) dashed down a piece that later became Miss Winter's letter to Margaret. At that stage, though, I didn't even know if it was the voice of a man or a woman. For all that Colette and Ripley played a part in the development of Miss Winter's character, I wouldn't go so far as to say that she is "based on" them.

Do you plan to move into other literary genres anytime in the near future? (Or perhaps this is best speculated on after the sequel!)

DS: It's hard to say. Although I have four or five different ideas for novels in my head, I can't say with any certainty which of them—if any—are likely to see the light of day. The Thirteenth Tale came together very slowly, over a period of about five years, and the way it turned out is different in many respects from the way I initially imagined it. I am the kind of person who likes to plan things out, but I accept that in writing, plans take you only so far. You have to leave room for serendipity, risk, the bolt from the blue?

I do love reading thrillers, and often toy with the idea of writing a murder story one day. (In fact, before starting The Thirteenth Tale, I did write a few thousand words of a detective novel, but I abandoned it when the idea for Miss Winter's story took shape.)

If you could gather a group of writers for an evening of food and drink, who would they be? And why?

DS: This is a curious question, you know! I could say how great it would be to have Angela Carter and Evelyn Waugh and Oscar Wilde and John Buchan round for dinner, but would it actually be more interesting than spending the evening alone with their books? Often writers are better company on the page than in the flesh. The first few times I got to see real writers, I was taken aback to see how ordinary they were, compared to their books. So I might forgo the offer to dine with a room of illustrious dead writers and just get my friends from book group round for a meal instead.

Though actually, I would be interested in meeting Hilary Mantel. Whenever I hear her talk about writing she makes such good sense, and I would like to be able to compare notes with her. But I wouldn't invite anyone else. I would serve smoked salmon and champagne, then vanilla macaroons and green tea.