Hagitude author Sharon Blackie: ‘At 60 I wasn’t ready to give up, I was just starting’

The writer of cult hit If Women Rose Rooted is on a mission to bring folklore to modern readers. She talks about confronting her fears, communing with nature – and the power that comes with age

Like many of the wise women in her books, Sharon Blackie lives miles from anyone. Hers is the only house on the road winding through a valley deep in the Yorkshire Dales. The River Eden runs along the bottom of her garden, which overlooks the ruins of a castle built, as legend has it, by King Arthur’s father. The writer shares this romantic idyll with three border collies, six sheep, nine hens and her husband, David Knowles, a former RAF Tornado pilot.

It seems an appropriate setting for an author who is on a mission to bring fairytales to modern readers. Blackie runs spiritual retreats and workshops at the nearby Broughton Sanctuary and publishes a popular Substack called The Art of Enchantment. Her books, including word-of-mouth hits such as If Women Rose Rooted and Hagitude, are a beguiling mix of memoir, mythology and eco-feminism – manifestos for a better way of living.

“The world which men have made isn’t working,” is how Blackie opens her 2019 memoir, If Women Rose Rooted. “To change the world, we women need first to change ourselves – and then we need to change the stories we tell about who we are.” By immersing ourselves in old stories, she argues, we will discover archetypes that will help us not only understand but rewrite our own. Plato, Baba Yaga and Jung all rub shoulders in her impassioned call for women to rediscover their lost power and connection to nature. Blackie’s books are something of a secret among a growing, largely female, readership across the world (as evidenced by rapturous quotes on the covers). But the spiritually averse need not be alarmed. In person, there is nothing wafty about this steely but softly spoken 65-year-old former academic and psychotherapist, who is clearly more used to asking the questions.

Never have we needed fairytales more than now, Blackie says, over tea and cake in her elegant sitting room. “The world feels incredibly precarious. And so we are faced with an existential crisis. Are we going to sit in a corner and gibber? Well, that’s all right for five minutes, but then you’ve got to get on with your life. And fairytales tell you how.”

Her new book, Ripening, was written almost as a guidebook for our times. “The fairytale heroine always leaves home with catastrophe snapping at her heels,” she explains. “They’re walking out of the door with barely the clothes on their back. They literally have nothing. And yet somehow, through qualities of character, they get through and find a way to thrive.” Blackie is not interested in updating these stories for the modern reader. We don’t need fairytales about girls with smartphones glued to their hands, she argues in Ripening. “If we see a girl pricking her finger on a spindle and falling asleep for a hundred years, left all alone and vulnerable, then we see the same kind of curse at work in the world.”

In the tradition of Angela Carter, Marina Warner, Emma Donoghue and Helen Oyeyemi, Blackie wants to reclaim these stories from the Disneyfication of the past century. Many of the heroines in her books would rather throw a frog at a wall than kiss one, and are “very much more likely to rescue than be rescued”. The heroine’s journey is one of young women discovering their agency through courage, grit and wit.

Blackie is determined to push back against the wicked stepmother and evil-witch tropes, to restore the “wise old woman” to her rightful place at the heart of society. Frustrated that all the well-known mythical women belong to Greek and Roman legends – “raped left, right and centre, and always secondary to men” – she set out to explore the Celtic folklore of her half-Irish, half-Scottish ancestry. “I discovered all these different ways of being a really interesting and useful old woman,” she says. “Why does nobody know about them?”

Her favourite mythical being is the Cailleach (“old woman” or hag in Scottish and Irish Gaelic), associated with winter and wilderness and as old as the land itself. “A very powerful role model for the challenges we face today,” she says. But the Selkie, a seal woman who is stranded out of water and has her skin stolen, or the miller’s daughter, whose father cut off her hands and must regrow them, are rich metaphors for her own story and for female narratives in general. Rebirth, transformation and renewal – the message of Blackie’s books is clear: be ready for “the Call”, which is most likely to come when you fear your story might be over.

She wrote Hagitude – “hags with attitude” – when she was approaching 60, because she couldn’t see a place for older women in contemporary culture. “I didn’t know who I was supposed to be, and I wasn’t ready to give up. I was just starting,” she says. Her first – “embarrassingly autobiographical” – novel, The Long Delirious Burning Blue, came out in 2008 when she was 46. But it is with seven nonfictional titles in the past decade that she has found her voice. Hagitude was published in 2022, the year before Victoria Smith’s Hags, a blistering critique of the demonisation of middle-aged women. Suddenly midlife women were the subject of both nonfiction and fiction, not to mention articles and podcasts such as The Shift.

While Blackie welcomes this new openness, she worries that too much of the conversation is about hanging on to one’s youth. “If you try to cling on to a stage of life that has passed, it’s not functional,” she says. “We don’t tell women that ‘Yes, the menopause is really shit, but actually there are some amazing things that can happen as a consequence of it and a whole new adventure.’ Oestrogen is the nurturing hormone. It’s the one that keeps you nice and wanting you to take care of people. And it’s gone. So what happens? You think, ‘OK, my whole life is not about being nice.’”

Growing up, the daughter of a single mother in the industrial north-east of England, Blackie never identified with the golden-haired princesses but with the wise old women. These “not-to-be-messed-with elders” recalled “the feisty old matriarchs” who ran the council estate and to whom Hagitude is dedicated. Her father was violent and left the family when she was four; her mother became an alcoholic. Their terrace house was infested with cockroaches. Caught between the sand dunes of Seaton Carew and the smoking chimneys of Hartlepool, this landscape was fertile ground for a young imagination alive to stories of witches and devils. There was no television, and she spent her time reading and making lists of the Knights of the Round Table.

Her first escape was to Liverpool University where she studied psychology. She started out as a neuroscientist but grew disillusioned with academia, and took a job working as a health and safety adviser for a tobacco company – “Go figure!” She hated corporate life, so she left London for a dilapidated cottage by an Irish bog. By this time, she had acquired a husband 20 years her senior, who turned out to be too much like her father. She fled to America but back into the arms of the cigarette giant. “When you grow up with an alcoholic mother and in poverty, you never feel quite safe,” she says. “I needed a job.”

In her mid-30s, living in Kentucky and on her “third midlife crisis”, she woke up one morning and thought, “I’m frightened of life.” She was terrified of flying. In July 1999, the day after John F Kennedy Jr died in a plane crash, she booked herself some flying lessons. Getting her pilot’s licence was the turning point, breaking the spell. “It changed everything,” she says. “It was that sense of, OK, if I can do that, then I can do anything.”

She handed in her notice for the last time, bought a croft in Ullapool, on the north-west coast of Scotland, retrained to become a psychoanalyst and signed up to an online creative writing course. As in all good fairy stories, she was rewarded for her bravery by meeting her second husband, David (“kind of having his own midlife crisis”). Together they set up a publishing company, Two Ravens Press, which, among other Scottish titles, published Alasdair Gray’s poetry. After 12 years they moved to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. They had a view of St Kilda from their kitchen window. “There is only you, the sea and the sky,” she writes in If Women Rose Rooted. There were very few people to talk to so she started talking to the land. She sees her four years on the island as “a grand love affair that couldn’t last for ever”.

She has arrived in the Lake District via spells in Ireland (Donegal) and Wales, always deep in the countryside. You don’t have to be a psychotherapist to see a pattern here. “Place has been by far the biggest teacher of my life. Place is a thread, when it pulls I follow,” she has said. While her insistence on following that thread – answering “the Call” – is seductive, for many of us it is as unrealistic as flying a plane. “You don’t have to go into the forest for seven years,” she replies, when I say it would take a fairy godmother to magic away the mortgage and school run. “It’s about finding a way in whatever life you’re living, of being able to step back and take stock. But yes, you have got to make the leap,” she concedes. “And that requires some kind of courage. I did that by getting on that plane.”

Late capitalism’s compulsion to keep on going, “the myth of more, more, more”, is failing us all, she feels. And modern psychology, “with its perpetual focus on individualism and wellbeing”, is no better. “The comfortable life causes spiritual decay,” she says quoting English philosopher Colin Wilson. “Very few people are living a comfortable life right now,” she says. She doesn’t like to talk about “privilege” because everybody is suffering in some way. “When I grew up, life was really hard, but you did have this sense of what it was to live a good life. Community was everything. I don’t see much evidence that young people today are growing up with that sense of kindness and courage and loyalty,” she says. “You need to believe that there is something ahead that’s worthwhile living for. And we don’t give people that.”

During the pandemic she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which – thanks to a private scan – was caught just in time. She is approaching five years in remission. “Of course, I made it all metaphorical,” she laughs now, preferring images of renewal over battle in coming to terms with cancer. “It was brutal, but it also changed everything. You’re completely stripped bare. I came out of it thinking, ‘OK, all these cells have been killed. Now it’s all new. It’s me.’”

She has no regrets about not having children. In her late 30s, she progressed a long way through the adoption process and then panicked. “If I had done motherhood, that would have been it,” she says now. “I’m obsessive with the dogs!” Her day starts at 4am, when it feels as if she owns the world. “It’s the dark. It’s the silence. It’s that sense that nobody else is up. Then you have room for all of the images and the ideas that feed into the books.”

Before I return to the station, we walk down to the river and she points out clumps of pink aubrieta sprinkled over the crumbling castle walls. The only sounds are the birds and the river. “Why would you not talk to the river? I’m just interested,” she asks. “It wasn’t woo-woo back in the day. It goes back to Plato and Pythagoras, a sense of everything being interconnected and all of these patterns that gave the universe its order.”

Is this where she is going to stay, I ask as we make our way back up the steps to the house. “Every time I feel as if I need to make a big psychological shift there has been a reason to move that has come along with it,” she replies carefully. “I’m not feeling that here.” Perhaps she has finally found her way home.

• Ripening: Why Women Need Fairytales Now is published by September Publishing. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.