'The success of The Miniaturist overwhelmed me but I couldn't let go of the characters'

“The same people who sneer at Instagrammers for posting photos of their meals are the same people who go to the National Gallery to admire Clara Peeters’ 17th-century oil paintings of cheese and grapes on silver platters and exquisite goblets glowing with wine,” says novelist Jessie Burton. “But, really, both sets of images are equally alluring to the appetite, and inviting our judgment.”

The 39-year old Oxford-educated author has spent a decade noting the parallels between the Dutch Golden Age – the setting for her international bestseller, The Miniaturist, and her new sequel, The House of Fortune – and the world today.

“The Dutch of the late 17th century were so wealthy and self-obsessed,” she continues. “They painted themselves and their interiors in intense, intricate detail over and over again. They fretted over their social status in a way that parallels 21st-century Instagram.

“Of course, the message underneath those old paintings was always: ‘Nothing lasts forever, don’t be too indulgent.’ It’s so Dutch – and maybe so now? – to boast about these carefully displayed pleasures while also worrying about them.”

Speaking via video from her matt-black-walled London living room, Burton is as poised and passionate in person as she is on the page. Her crisply ironed shirt and precise answers to my questions is impressive for the mother of a nine-month-old son, although she admits a number of her carefully curated ornaments have been moved to higher ground, out of reach of little fingers.

The Miniaturist was an instant success when it was published in 2014. The story of a young Dutch girl called Nella and the secrets and lies within an Amsterdam household which are reflected in miniature in a doll’s house, it was swiftly adapted by the BBC for a star-studded Christmas miniseries in 2017 and praised by everyone from Martin Scorsese to the Spice Girls.

But Burton says she found the huge response to her debut novel “overwhelming”.

“All those sales left me feeling unable to be The Miniaturist’s physical representative on this planet,” she says. “And also, I didn’t want to be only known for writing about that world, because I had so many other stories I wanted to tell.” So she wrote two more novels for adults – The Muse (2016) and The Confession (2019) – set in different countries in different periods, as well as two books for children. In fact, she says she “didn’t physically open the covers of The Miniaturist for six years”.

It was only at an event at a literature festival in 2019 that she realised she would have to return to the richly sensory Dutch world she had created. “For the first time in a while I was asked to discuss The Miniaturist and, after we’d left the stage, the interviewer told me I’d come alive in a different way while discussing the book; that I’d been ‘suffused with something’. I told my agent I was ready to go back to Nella. And when I did begin thinking about her [and the book’s other characters] again, it felt like taking old, childhood toys out of a box. There was so much tender connection, and so many questions.”

While The Miniaturist was driven by the tension between innocent-but-tenacious young Nella and her domineering-but-vulnerable sister-in-law Marin, The House of Fortune focuses on the frisson between Nella’s survivalist mentality and her niece Thea’s idealism. “I knew that baby Thea would grow up to have her own story,” says Burton. “The dialogue between women of different generations has been a running theme through all of my books. I was curious about what they’d find to teach each other.

“Nella is an older woman whose sexual appetite was unfulfilled. And Thea is a younger woman who experiences sexual pleasure and romantic love. They’re in conflict over what’s more important for Thea to have a happy life, and neither of them have the answers.”

As the only child of a “vivacious, occasionally embarrassing” mother, Burton understands the challenges of this dynamic. She tells me her mum – a keen crafter – “always wore bright colours and had a laugh you can hear from streets away. She sometimes sprayed polka dot dye into her white-blonde hair and often talks to strangers.”

“We’ve always had very direct conversations,” she adds. “And that must feed into the energy of my fiction. Her house – my childhood home – burned down while I was writing The House of Fortune.”

Luckily the Sylvanian Families toy village – Burton’s favourite childhood toy and partial inspiration for the doll’s house at the heart of The Miniaturist – survived the conflagration. But it’s ironic that the fetisher of tiny things had her childhood home in Wimbledon destroyed by the glare from a crafting magnifying glass, which concentrated the sun’s rays onto a flammable curtain.

Burton says that the playful control of narrative she developed with her toys fed into her early ambition to become an actor. After Oxford, she studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama, in London, but never got the parts she craved. She laughs about her walk-on part in the TV adaptation of The Miniaturist: “I was in the Silversmiths’ Ball scene. I loved getting dressed up and walking around inside a world of my invention. But when I watched the finished episode I saw that only the tip of my nose made the final cut. Pretty humbling to realise that would be the pinnacle of my acting career.”

Her experience of watching The Miniaturist’s sets dismantled is reflected in The House of Fortune. “By the late 17th century, the VOC [Dutch East India Company] was in decline,” says Burton. “Nella’s fortune was built on that trade and at the beginning of this book we see her grand mansion is emptying out. It’s like a film set that’s shutting down.”

Her characters all respond differently to the economic decline. Nella wants to cling to the old class structure and marry Thea off to a wealthy aristocrat, but Thea has fallen for a handsome set painter at the local theatre.

Because “Thea is a woman of dual heritage, and I’m not”, Burton was grateful for the feedback of a sensitivity reader. “I wanted readers to be gunning for Thea, and our sensitivity reader’s feedback was very enlightening. She said: ‘Thea is living in Amsterdam in the winter and if you think her hair isn’t going to get frizzed up by that then you’re mistaken!’ I had scenes in which she got ready to leave the house in five minutes and my SR said it would have taken much longer than that to dress her hair. So I watched lots of online tutorials about how to treat African Caribbean hair.”

As a judge of this year’s Costa Book Prize, Burton says she “feels shocked, angry [and] really sad” about the news earlier this month that the prize is being scrapped.

“I know there are arguments against those prizes. But I do think the Costa was so good and powerful because it was still literary, but it promoted an enjoyable reading experience. So many past winners have said the prize gave them a huge boost and readers trusted it to pick good reads.”

In the meantime, Burton doesn’t rule out the possibility she might return to Nella for a third time.

“My connection to Nella and her world is very deep,” she says. “I’ve signed a contract to write two more children’s books, and I want to spend time with my son. But I can’t let go of Nella.” She rolls her eyes. “I picture myself at 65 thinking, ‘Right then, Nella, let’s see what you’re doing now …’ ”

‘The House of Fortune’ will be published by Picador on July 7