Clark, tall and slender as a reed, carried the obvious look of London about her. Her sleeveless dress, of an indefinable color - perhaps plum - consisted of what looked like crocheted lace, which gracefully emphasized her elegant carriage. Looking at her self-assured carriage, most people would not necessarily think of her as an author of two fascinating, exiting and revealing novels that carry considerable weight. These are novels about her birthplace, London, though set in very different times from the present.

Her shepherding publicist wisely guided us to the hotel's coffee shop, where Clark ordered hot milk to go with her coffee in an Oh, so English manner. It was a warm day and the coffee visibly perked us up since we all had been rushing around before the meeting. Although I had come to talk to her about her latest book, The Nature of Monsters, our conversation began by touching on her previous published book, The Great Stink.

"I first wanted to write about Victorian London," she admitted, "but nothing to do with the domestic sphere." What she ended up writing about was how the sewers of that great city during the 1850s had an odoriferous impact on life, hence the title, The Great Stink. "I started off thinking about railways." There was that twinkle in her eyes again. "Wandsworth, after all, was a swamp before the railway arrived." Having researched the railways for a while, and their effect on London and Victorian England, she came across London's sewers, a subject she found much more inspiring. Since The Great Stink's protagonist and major characters were all male, for her second book she wanted a book about women. "I wanted to show how different it was to be a woman."

Pulling her hand through her flowing hair, she continued, "I wanted to show the entrenched misogyny." So she opted for the early Georgian period of 1718-20, when London had just come out of the religious wars and newly built St. Paul's Cathedral had become a focal point of the city.

As it turned out it would be the cathedral that sparked her second novel. "It started with St. Paul's. A girlfriend, who is a conservator and worked on the restoration of the Thornhill (Sir James) paintings, took me up on the scaffolding under the dome. So, it was Sophie who started me off." After the unusual experience of seeing the cathedral from up high and learning about its background she wanted to write a novel in which St. Paul's somehow took a feature role. Well, the dominating structure didn't quite make it as the main character in The Nature of Monsters, but it makes its presence felt. Clark's protagonist in the novel is Eliza Tally, who comes to live not far from the cathedral after arriving in London. She is awed by the building from the very moment she first sees it from on top of Hampstead Hill on her journey down to the city. Grayson Black, her employer-to-be, however, despises the structure. Black is the antagonist in The Nature of Monsters, one whose presence is more felt than actually seen, but one that has life-altering effects on Eliza's life.

"To pay for St. Paul's, money was raised by tax on coal. That is how they raised the money. Wren (architect Sir Christopher Wren) also introduced charging entry to the church in 1709, long before it became the thing to do anywhere else. You had the religious age and commerce coming together, and I found that fascinating," she explained. "Wren took his inspiration [for St. Paul's] from St. Peter's in Rome. Some thought it dreadfully Papist. The whole sort of anti-Catholic thing was still very real then."

Clark also learned from her friend that Wren had been deeply concerned about perspective. "He wanted a different perspective on the inside of the dome, so he created what is actually three domes stacked one inside the other," Clark pointed out. "The cathedral dominating London was a big statement to God, but also to London's preėminence."

Clark, who does all of her own research before she begins to write her novels, also chose the early 18^th century because "it gave me a chance to write about a woman. Socially they had more freedom then than 150 years later. Women ran chandleries, weapon factories, blacksmith shops. But they were also vulnerable to the fortunes of men. Women like Black's wife, they were very vulnerable to the fortunes that awaited their menfolk."

The author admitted to spending a great deal of time researching at the Battersea Public Library before actually sitting down to write her books. "I tend not to write anything until I have immersed myself in the period about which I am going to write. I start to write when I am sure in my heart that I am as familiar with the period as I am with my own. I found that for the second book it took less long to create that world inside of me."

As every writer has a different way of approaching the writing of a novel, I wondered whether Clark knew in advance where the book will lead her. "My story comes out of my research. My characters come out of my research. They walk out of it. That way they come out of their time. If a book is good, the characters speak to me. They have a voice in which they speak to you. If not, you end up with Dick van Dyke and Mary Poppins."

At this point Clark' s voice rose a little, typical of a South London accent that until then  had not been apparent to me. "Every writer who misses the relationship between writer and reader will fail. You have to trust your readers," she said with conviction.

Since she has an eight-year-old son, Charlie, and a six-year-old daughter, Flora, she must be very disciplined in her work attitude. Among other things, she is the chairwoman of the board of the children's school. "I am very well organized," she admitted. "I take my children to school. I actually walk them to school, then when I get back home I do a few things around the house before I start to write." To do this she removes herself from the house to a small studio at the end of her garden. There she works for about four hours, "maybe five, then at 3:30 it is time to pick the children up from school."

On a good day Clark writes about a thousand words, though it often is more like 750. Hence she is glad there is no telephone in her studio. The Internet, however, is present. To write without interruption she tries to disable her Internet connection, although she doesn't always succeed. For her, as for most of us, the Internet has its advantages and disadvantages and offers many distracting temptations.

Although The Nature of Monsters is her second published book, Clark has actually written three. She and her husband lived for four years in Manhattan, where her children were born. After Charlie's birth she decided to take time off from working in the administrative side of advertising to take care of him. Although she graduated with a double first in history from Cambridge, she chose not to develop that into a career. There had always been a desire to write. "All through my twenties I wanted to write." To achieve this end she attended an evening course in writing at NYU. While it didn't teach her much about writing, it provided the discipline she needed as she was forced to write, and then read what she had written before the class. This submitted her to criticism and to feedback about her work. "It gave me discipline and confidence to go through with writing a contemporary novel. It was about an English woman living in Manhattan." She actually found an agent to sell the book to a publisher. Unfortunately, then 9/11 happened and no one wanted a book about New York. "So it was its fate to be stillborn."

When she decided to write her next book, she chose a historic period because she felt that the field for contemporary novels is crowded. "I had a terror of writing something that everyone else had written. The historical element freed me up." It turned out to be the right decision, because The Great Stink "flew out of me in 13 months. That is very quick with two small babies around."

Through contacts she found three agents who wanted to represent her, and she settled on Clare Alexander. "I was hugely lucky. I couldn't have found someone more suitable. She is very encouraging." As it turned out Clark had five publishers bidding for The Great Stink, and she had the luxury of having to choose. She ended up with a two-book deal with Harcourt.

Lest one gets the impression Clark is resting on her laurels of having two successful books, she revealed that she is already working on her third. It is set in early Louisiana. While none of her books appear to having anything in common on the surface, there is an underlying connection. "What they have in common is that they (the main characters) have to rediscover the world and who they are," she stated. All of her protagonists end up in a world that is in some ways foreign to them, which forces them to come to terms with the world they do not understand. Putting her next protagonist into the New World, transposing a European — one presumes someone French — into the heat of the Louisiana territory and among the Natives certainly seems like a challenging adventure, for both writer and protagonist.

Does she make a living from her books? Clark laughs. " I'm not sure. Chris (her husband) is the one who looks after these things." One hopes she is because so far her books have been translated into six languages with a generally favorable reception. Having read some dreadful translation I ask her how she feels about her work being translated into another language. She admitted to being unconcerned about her books not being translated properly as translators come to her when they have difficulty with a passage. "I had a lovely experience," she said, referring to her book in German translation. "Berlin has a lovely book festival." There the reading of her book took place in an old WWII bunker in East Berlin. Reading under flickering gaslight, she alternated with a German actress who read from the German version of her book, while she read the same passage in English. "It was a really special feeling to hear your words read in another language. It is almost an out-of-body experience to hear your words read in this subterranean Berlin bunker," she said with that special shine in her blue eyes that gives Clark an aura of great intensity. "It was very emotional." She actually studied German to her O Levels, but admitted not being fluent in the language.

There is always the question whether or not an author is present in a book. "I feel I am an instrument. I am not present in the story but there is a part of me in it." Since she creates an outline of about 12 pages about where the book is supposed to go, before she actually sits down to write seriously, she has an idea of how to proceed. "In The Great Stink the characters stuck to the plan but in Monsters they wanted to go their own way."

And now it was our time to go our own way as well. The coffee had been drunk, and the half hour allotted ended up as being one. There is just one more story that needs to be told. Clark dedicated The Great Stink to her husband Chris, and when it came to The Nature of Monsters she wanted to dedicated it to both her children. Flora, however, objected. She wanted a book dedicated to her alone. So the six-year-old suggested to her mother that she dedicate book number two to Charlie and the next one to Flora. The child obviously has faith in her mother's writing abilities. As one who has read both books, I can only concur with the child's faith.