In Conversation with Alice Hattrick

by Ella Sperling

Alice Hattrick is a London-based writer and lecturer at the University of the Arts, London. In 2016, they were shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize. Their genre-bending debut novel Ill Feelings (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021) was described by Francesca Wade as “a deeply personal and deeply political reckoning with the nature of illness, inheritance, time, silence, bodies and invisibility.”

Hattrick’s latest novel, Fancy Work, explores the life of embroidery designer May Morris and her wider circle, including her father, William Morris, her mother Jane Morris (a model and embroiderer herself), and ‘MF’, May’s gender non-conforming partner of twenty years. Through textiles and craft, Fancy Work traces a bold history of queer identity, intimacy, and domestic expectation.

Fancy Work was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions on the 18th June 2026.

ES: One of the key threads of Fancy Work is that of queer identity, and the historical relationship between May and MF. Between MF’s scrapbooking and May’s technical studies of historical embroidery, you allow your research subjects in the novel to take on their own roles of archivist, researcher, historian, and curator. How did this shape your relationship to your subjects? And is “research subjects” even a term you would use for May and MF?

AH: I like the idea of figures from the past being interlocutors or collaborators rather than ‘research subjects’, in the way Rozskia Parker described making as ‘entering into a network that connects you to other makers’. This spoke to me because of textiles’ relationship to loss. Regardless of what survives or makes its way back, regardless of what we can see or touch, traces of physical gestures, of feelings, or performances remain.

May wasn’t young when she met MF, a landworker from Cornwall who moved in with May in 1917. She had already had a life. May ran William Morris’s embroidery studio and designed some of his iconic wallpapers, had relationships with George Bernard Shaw and an eventual marriage to Henry Sparling (secretary of the Hammersmith Socialist Society). She taught at Birmingham School of Art and did a lecture tour around America. She had also spent years editing and writing introductions to all of Morris’s written work, including his Icelandic sagas. She also had an independent life, after this work, and kept her lease on her London house until 1924, when she moved to Kelmscott to live there year-round with MF.

May has been described as the first curator of Kelmscott Manor, the family’s rented London house where her father, William Morris, had previously held socialist meetings. She was central to preserving and publishing her father’s life’s work, and looking after the house and garden, including William Morris’s topiary dragon. She continued his work in other ways, going to lots of meetings for the preservation of ancient buildings, and through her socialist work, raising money to build houses in the village to make it possible for local people to stay living there.

I was interested in this period of her life – not the work she did for ‘The Firm’ and its legacy, but this afterlife. Here she is ‘curating’ in the sense that she is caring for the legacy of her parents, but also creating a life of her own, making what she wanted to make, going on these adventures with MF and working on the land together. She also ‘curated’ herself out of the picture, in a way, because so many of the personal objects were not saved, so even though it’s a useful concept to explain why she and MF are not more present in the house now, I also want to push back at this role. Their absence from the house is quite startling considering they lived there for so long, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there, it’s just that their presence needs to be registered in other ways. This is what José Esteban Muñoz calls ‘queer gestures’ – the things that hang in the air, rather than leave material evidence.

ES: Across the book, you describe several trips to specific archives. Is it fair to say that your navigation of each archive is as much a part of your research as the archive’s contents themselves?

AH: Archival work is incredibly labour-intensive, and more constrained than writing. I have to go when I have day’s off, or during breaks from term time, so there’s also time pressure. I am sort of squeezing it in between work, hoping I can swap days around to get to an archive or reading room on the days it’s open and I can get an appointment. I’m also working with limitations due to chronic illness, and it’s a very physical experience. You have to get there by train, by foot, or by taxi – sometimes a combination of all three. Maybe it’s really hot, or it’s raining. Then you have to find the way in (the Prints Room at the Ashmolean, for example, isn’t even on the museum’s map!). If you can get there, you’re left with these bits of stuff – these scraps – that you then have to work out what to do with, sometimes even what they are at all, how it relates to everything you know so far.

ES: Has your relationship with the archive changed in the five years between your first novel, Ill Feelings, and Fancy Work? 

In my first book, I drew on my own ‘archive’ of health records, and I read a lot of digitised books that were published in the late 19th century. It meant I could work from bed or at least at home. For this book, though, I wanted to think about materiality and gesture, the tension between what survives and what remains despite loss. This remains a material question. I was interested in the physical conditions that surround it – what else is there, who is caring for it and who is visiting, how objects are displayed and stored, and of course how they ended up there in the first place? These encounters are multi-sensory: MF’s gardening scrapbook smells of woodsmoke. We think of scent as fleeting, but it lingers. Being with an object does matter because it forces you to think with it.

ES: Do you have conscious questions in mind when you enter these archives? What are you looking for, if anything in particular?

AH: The key question is: “What does this mean to me? What has no one else considered before?” I’m really looking for moments of connection when I have an emotional reaction to something.

Researching and writing with the archives for Fancy Work, for example, has been fraught as well as joyful. There’s what is known as the ‘empty archive’, where material has been lost or damaged, which is especially prevalent when seeking out traces of queer lives. There is a lot of happenstance with what survives and what gets lost, especially when wills aren’t clear, or material is dispersed at the time of a person’s death. May’s will didn’t specify where a lot of objects should end up, so a huge amount was sold at an auction after MF died.

It can also be very painful. As an example, there are some condolence letters in the basement of Kelmscott House, which were sent to May’s close friend Mary after she died in 1938. In one of them, MF is described as a cailliac-bodach, which is not a phrase I was familiar with (in folklore, Cailleach is an old woman who controls the weather and Bodach is a trickster old man). I had a feeling it wasn’t a kind term, especially as in the same letter MF is described as ‘the Cornish hermaphrodite’. I just had a visceral reaction and followed that instinct. Likewise, when May is called “unconventional” and when she uses the term “artistic”, language became a way to read their lives as queer, even if they wouldn’t have identified with it the way I do (as bisexual and genderqueer) in the present.

There is also the issue of gatekeeping. I had one or two frustrating experiences, and these became part of the work itself. You get excited when you see something in a catalogue that then disappears, as with May’s travel journals, which she kept as records of her trips around the UK with MF. At first, I was a bit lost, like what am I going to do without them, and how can I tell this story? That became the story – that the gaps and silences are offerings, they are part of writing queer lives and writing with textiles.

ES: I recently read Deborah Levy’s Real Estate – the final book in her “living autobiography” trilogy. Like Fancy Work, it also deals with the process of shaping oneself, one’s life, and one’s gender identity in relation to the dream/fantasy of homeownership. Did the events in your life at the time of writing lead themes of homeownership to percolate into what was initially a study of embroidery? Or did a study grounded in domestic labour, domestic usage, domestic routine, and domestic partnership naturally lead to questions of how a home ought to be made/acquired?  

AH: Levy’s ‘living autobiography’ trilogy is so important, because it opened up ways for me to think about life writing in the present, rather than from memory, as in a traditional memoir. It’s the feeling, when reading, that you don’t know where she’s going to end up – which is how life feels, especially when what you expected from the rest of your life is altered.

As I’m sure many of us were, I was very preoccupied with domestic life during lockdown. I lived on my own with my dog in a temporary house, but I never rallied against confinement. It gave me a profound relief, aside from the horror of the disease and its mismanagement. I became really attached to the domestic, to making a life through it, remaking myself in a space. I did this through textiles because I couldn’t change anything in the house itself. I used it as a space to resist productive time. I learnt to dye fabrics with plants, started drawing again, pieced quilt tops and embroidery – activities in which I could lose time.

When I met my partner, this drive to make a life of my own out of time transformed into wanting to make a home with her that was permanent and fixed – what I called my ‘domestic fantasies.’ I felt very ambivalent about the reality of homeownership, of giving up my own temporariness and becoming. I also couldn’t see how we could afford it. This all became part of the story while I was working on the project. I negotiated a lot of these feelings through embroidery – making a large-scale ‘crazy quilt’ inspired by May and Jane Morris’s ‘Homestead and Forest’ Quilt. I think home and family are ideas to be worked through – they are never resolved or static.

ES: Finally, academics are typically taught to remove the “I” from their work, but an increasing number of (often female and/or queer) academics working in creative criticism and life writing are embracing the autobiographical nature of archival research. What does it look like to acknowledge one’s presence in one’s research? Should this process of patch-working and personalising, often presented as a creative aside to an academic’s formal research, be seen as a methodology of rigorous scholarship?

AH: I really don’t know any different. As a writer, I’ve never been concerned in achieving a sense of objectivity. I’m interested in undermining it, in thinking about how to describe the feeling that you know yourself but also change your mind all the time, that we are unknowable to each other and ourselves.

I had very early experiences of disbelief due to gendered illness, and I think that has contributed to a lack of certainty in my own thoughts and feelings – my experience of the world. I use research and writing to think through that experience through the lives of others. I want to work out the connections, trace what remains but also what changes.

I’m also not interested in memoir for its own sake – it has to be in the service of thinking through bigger systems. We all live with different constraints, and it’s all part of the book, which is really about how we live with our limitations, how we survive damage, and what we can learn from what survives and what gets lost, the gaps and silences that inevitably occur. This is why I like the analogy of a ‘crazy’ quilt – piecing together precious scraps of material and embroidering all around the joins. You’re not following a regular or orderly pattern. You’re piecing it together in a way that pleases you.

Image Credit: Fitzcarraldo Editions, with permission from author