Almost the first thing I see when I step inside Kate Mosse’s Chichester house is her 94-year-old mother-in-law, known as Granny Rosie, sipping her lunchtime gin and tonic and hunched over a codeword puzzle in the kitchen. A couple of uneaten sandwiches lie on a plate in front of her, which Mosse urges her to eat. But Granny Rosie is more interested in trying to place the letter X and, as I try uselessly to help, she seizes on her error. “Done it!” she says triumphantly. “She sometimes manages it in 10 minutes,” says Mosse.
Granny Rosie, who has lived with Mosse, 63, and her writer husband Greg for nearly 30 years, is one reason why Mosse is less able these days to visit her beloved Carcassonne, the medieval walled citadel in France, where the best-selling author has had a house since 1989, and whose blood-soaked history inspired her 2005 global smash hit Labyrinth.
Rosie is now in a wheelchair and although in spirit is as independent as ever, she needs more help from Mosse, who is her full-time carer (the house is proudly, if intimidatingly, intergenerational, with Mosse’s daughter Martha, director of the Paul Smith Foundation, and her two-year-old grandson Finn also currently in residence, along with Greg’s brother-in-law, a photographer. Mosse also has a son, Felix, a writer and script editor).
So if Mosse can’t go to Carcassonne, Carcassonne must come to her. This month she embarks on a 34-date tour in honour of the book’s 20th anniversary, in which she will immerse her novel’s many devoted fans in the region’s brutal warmongering and esoteric mythology through a mix of storytelling and personal anecdotes.
“I did a similar tour last year to launch my book Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries [an alternative feminist history], and when the publishers suggested that, I was terrified,” she says, a small, neat, dynamic figure dressed down in jeans and sweater. “But my parents always brought me up to give things a go.”
Few novels celebrate their 20th birthday with such fanfare but then few novels have had such seismic popular impact. Mosse had previously written four books, having left her publishing job as an editorial director at Hodder in 1992 in order to write, but she was also struggling to make ends meet when Labyrinth was published. A furiously paced female-fronted time-slip adventure that splices the persecution of the 12th-century Cathars by the Catholic North with the legends of the Holy Grail, it has now sold more than 10 million copies in 41 countries.
“Its success meant I no longer had to take every journalism job I was offered for a couple of hundred quid,” she says. “It was great after some very lean years to not have to think about the pounds, shilling and pence. But most of all it meant that when my father, who had Parkinson’s, started to deteriorate, and the time came for us to throw in our lot together to support my mother, we could find a house that could accommodate everyone and we could afford to access the expert carers he needed. That is what I am most grateful for.”
That house is the one she still lives in, a spacious double-fronted Edwardian on the outskirts of Chichester. It had previously been an old people’s home and, when Mosse and Greg bought it, required a huge amount of renovation. “There were all these hideous thick brown doors everywhere, while the garden was littered with awful green and pink baths used as planters.”
She and Greg had an annexe built for her parents to live in and for years she helped her mother, a former teacher of economics, to look after her father, who had been a solicitor, an experience she writes about in her 2021 memoir An Extra Pair of Hands.
Mosse still wells up when talking about her parents. Both had been well known and loved in the town in which they had lived for many years, although they had brought up Mosse and her sister in nearby Fishbourne, and had devoted much of their lives to voluntary work. “They were good people, real pillars of the community. When they died [her mother passed away in 2014] there were not enough orders of service for their funerals.”
She had imagined her father dying long before he did: Labyrinth contains a deeply touching scene between the 17-year-old Alais and her dying father, a local nobleman. “I’d obviously not had that experience at that point, but I put everything that I feared it would be like into writing that scene. I realised I got it exactly right, except my dad, unlike Alais’s father, had a very good death. I was with him, the windows were open, the birds were singing and it was a lovely May morning.”
Mosse, who studied English at Oxford University, has written many novels since Labyrinth, including its two sequels Citadel and Sepulchre and The Burning Chambers quartet, inspired by the French Wars of Religion. All are imbued with an almost mystical feel for history and a romantic sense of place.
Yet conversation with Mosse naturally keeps veering back to that book: even the room we are sitting in, a light-filled study painted racing green, contains an entire wall devoted to its many editions. It stood out when it was published for feminising the quest-propelled adventure genre traditionally perceived, thanks in no small part to Dan Brown, as the exclusive preserve of men.
Yet some reviewers insisted on labelling it as “women’s fiction”, perhaps unable to accept that Mosse had strayed out of her lane by not writing “a domestic story”, as she puts it. One broadsheet called it “the thinking girl’s summer reading”. Mosse had to fight hard to persuade the publishers to “not put a picture of flowers on the front cover” and for years resisted calls from film producers who were keen to adapt it but who insisted on including a male lead. “It’s a story about two girls. Who did they think the male lead was going to be? So there was always that underlying thing.”
The irony is that few novelists had devoted more energy to battling “that underlying thing”, whereby fiction written by and about women is seen as less worthy than that written by men, than Mosse. A decade previously she had founded The Women’s Prize to celebrate female fiction precisely because the year before the 1991 Booker shortlist had featured only male authors. Mosse’s point wasn’t that the judges should have picked a couple of women; it was that no one noticed, or cared, that they hadn’t.
She expected the Women’s Prize launch at the ICA to resemble “a Breughel painting, full of people waving their hats in excitement”. Instead “one journalist asked me if I was a lesbian. Another man rang my husband and told him he should be ashamed of letting his wife behave like that.” Evidently the idea of a literary prize celebrating women was too much for some men to take. “There were a lot of unpleasant emails. Some people find the idea of women standing shoulder to shoulder very challenging.”
To some extent she thinks she got off lightly. “I’d like to think I’d have the courage to launch something like The Women’s Prize today but I know [the abuse on social media] would be awful. I’d need to have a much thicker skin than I do. I have female friends who are MPs and the abuse they get is sickening.”
Many of the Women’s Prize’s detractors, though, have been women. Germaine Greer and the late AS Byatt were among those who argued when the prize was established that giving women special treatment in this way was condescending, and ran counter to the aim of not pigeon-holing women’s literature. Today with female novelists on average dominating around 75 per cent of the contemporary fiction market, and with five women on the Booker shortlist in 2024, what, one might ask, is the point of the prize?
Mosse has heard this argument many times. “It’s not about quotas,” she says. “There have always been more women published than men. The Women’s Prize was never about access to market, it was about celebrating and honouring women’s fiction as being equal to men’s.
“There is still the misconception that ‘literature’ is what we all studied at school and university – which is mostly works by men with a male protagonist and universal; whereas fiction written by women, particularly with a female protagonist, is still seen as ‘for women’ and not for all readers. And although the Women’s Prize has turned the dial, there is still a job to be done. It’s great that five women were on the Booker shortlist but the fact it was commented on is down to the Women’s Prize.”
The next frontier, she says, is non-fiction. Last year she launched a sister prize, The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, with the inaugural winner Naomi Klein for Doppelganger, a memoir about shifting political allegiances in the age of big tech.
“Women are likely to receive lower advances for their books in this area, and the ‘smart thinking’ shelves in bookshops are often a female-free zone. Women are still not perceived as being ‘expert’ on the same terms as their male colleagues, even when their experience and their achievements are comparable. I get that as an artist no one wants to be defined by their gender, but we know that in real life that’s not how it works.”
Shifting the dial is becoming Mosse’s life work. Her next project is a YA work of non-fiction, Feminist History For Every Day of the Year, containing 366 stories of influential women throughout history, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Billie Eilish, which will be published in September. When she wrote it, she was warned by her editors not to assume knowledge on behalf of her readers.
“They told me [most young girls], for instance, won’t have heard of Greenham Common, which was so big for my generation and such a crucial part of the women’s movement.” To some extent it didn’t surprise her. “From what I hear from teachers, there is very little about women’s achievements taught in schools.”
She hopes as many boys will read it as girls. “There are so many pressures on young boys. Many of them feel quite threatened by feminism. You can see this [playing out] in the Andrew Tate phenomenon. But for me this is what feminism is about. Rigid patriarchal structures benefit no one but a tiny few. I’ve always written about strong women and gentle men in my fiction because what about all those boys who don’t want to be that boy? They are under as much pressure [as girls] to behave in ways that don’t feel normal to them. And when they come through it, when they are a bit older, those men who were a bit laddish in their youth are often a bit horrified by their behaviour.”
Does she think these gender pressures are partly responsible for the mental health crisis in young people? “Oh yes, quite possibly. Boys and girls are under such peer pressure. And then there’s the social media echo chamber. There is no shared story in the way there used to be. Instead we have a sense of disconnect [brought about by technology]. Everyone has ear buds plugged in and that normal engagement you used to have with strangers on the street, the simple courtesy of hearing or saying ‘after you’ etc is gone.”
Mosse is an indefatigable natural campaigner, blessed with a natural clipboard efficiency. Thanks to An Extra Pair of Hands she has recently found herself becoming a spokesperson for Britain’s growing number of largely invisible care workers. “I can’t speak for every carer, not least since my situation is particularly privileged,” she says.
“We have the room, plus Greg and I are both writers who work from home. But the stats are terrifying. There is a huge number of child carers for instance [the exact figure is estimated to be around 120,000]. By the age of 59, 50 per cent of women will become an unpaid carer [although this might only amount to a few hours a week]. If we all downed tools the NHS would collapse in an instance. Successive governments have for years failed to implement meaningful reforms in this area but it’s partly out of fear. The issue is not a vote winner. And so the situation goes on.”
Where does she stand on assisted dying? “I believe everyone should have agency over their own body. So it needs to start from that. That doesn’t mean I don’t have big concerns over coercion. Of course it needs to be fully regulated.” Her love for Granny Rose feels sewn into the very fabric of the house, although caring for a nonagenarian is not without its comedy moments. “She once pressed her panic button by mistake and the police rushed round to find her sunbathing in the garden in her underwear. So we don’t leave her by herself anymore.”
Her most recent stance has been against Labour’s recent consultation on copyright and AI data mining, which came under fierce criticism from the creative industries when it was launched in December for allowing companies to train AI using published material without permission unless individual artists opted out.
“It comes down to money,” says Mosse, who has had five of her novels licensed without permission in this way. “[Labour] have their heads turned by Silicon Valley and automatic growth. AI companies are saying that artists have to opt out. What they mean is they don’t want to pay. They say if they do have to pay they won’t invest. But most of these tech companies are off shore. But it’s also ludicrous. It means I have to go round every AI company to say ‘don’t steal my work’. It’s like owning a corner shop and a succession of thieves steal all your Mars bars because you didn’t ask each thief not to do so.
“The UK has one of the oldest and most robust copyright laws in the world, it dates from 1710 and it’s very simple. You own your work.” She gives a wry smile. “When Silicon Valley accused the Chinese chatbox DeepSeek of theft by saying it may have been trained on American AI models, you couldn’t help but laugh, because that’s what American AI has done to writers.”
She’s not remotely anti tech, although she is not a fan of some of the bros who dominate it: she came off X when Musk took over. “Partly because it was suddenly full of adverts for bitcoin. It was like an arcade. But also, I didn’t want to be part of something run by someone who has such contempt for democracy.”
Would she allow AI to license her work if they paid? “Yes, absolutely. AI needs all that female history. AI generally is here to stay, it’s the future, that’s it. There are so many amazing things that will happen through AI. But a dazzling thing has gone on whereby we have become blind to the significant issues that AI will bring.”
Such as the existential challenge it presents to writing itself. “AI relies on recycling; it’s hard not to worry that whatever literature it produces will be very thin indeed. I’m not worried for me but for the writers yet to come. That’s why I’m happy to use my platform.”
She uses that platform wherever she can. Her current passion project is the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban, and along with the organisation Untold Narratives she is working with an Afghan Women’s Writers Group.
“Where we are in the world right now is a place that as a feminist I never thought I’d see. In Afghanistan women are being erased.” She agrees that by and large there has been a startling absence of protest against this in the West, particularly among feminists. “What’s happening in Afghanistan is at the top of my agenda. It’s not at the top of others. Instead different things are..”
Yet she’s not about to bash the younger generation. She bats away, for example, the suggestion that publishing has become dominated by younger editors intent on pursuing “woke’” agendas. “When I worked in publishing [in the 1980s] it was definitely a bit of a gentleman’s club. But it’s also always been full of people who feel passionately about things. In the 1980s the cause was apartheid and South Africa and there were lots of fights between editors on how publishing should be responding to that. Publishing has always had those spats.”
Mosse, ever the doer, prefers deeds to virtue signalling. “The job is not to persuade everyone in the world that you are right, but rather, if you believe you are right, then to do the right thing,” she says. “I’ve never found moaning about things very helpful. You have to get things done.”
Labyrinth: 20th Anniversary Edition by Kate Mosse with a specially commissioned introduction by Sir Ian Rankin and a new afterword by Kate Mosse is published by Phoenix on February 20 2025, Hardback, £30.
Labyrinth Live: Unlocking the Secrets of the Labyrinth www.labyrinthlive2025.com
