I discovered for the first time the work of Julia Jacques through a screening of her moving, emotional film You will be free. I was a few months into my transition and longed for someone or something to express my feelings about the world. The film, a series of reflections on queer embodiment and liberation, did what art does best: it didn’t define my pain, it simply spoke to it. Throughout her career Jacques has demonstrated her unerring ability to express the experience of life on the fringes of society with poetic subtlety.. Her new book, The woman in portraita collection of published and unpublished short stories from 2008 onwards, is both a record of this astonishing work and a testament to the communities that each played a role in its creation.

Many of the characters in her stories lead, at least superficially, unremarkable lives: Nazimovaa woman signs a certificate recognizing her gender as “female”; A typical dayJulia, a transsexual office worker, is addressed incorrectly during a customer meeting; and in DCB: A partial retrospectivean artist – who was born David in 1936 and changed her name to Delia in 1963 – her entire story is traced, although she never produced much art or became particularly well-known. And yet, out of these ordinary conditions, Jacques creates entire worlds that never fail to surprise and entertain the reader. Part queer fiction, part socialist polemic, The woman in portrait is a study of the meaning of the everyday and the political significance of the personal: at its core, it is an empowering encounter with the most powerless in society.

Here Juliet Jacques discusses some of the key influences and themes behind The woman in portrait.

Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin: The woman in portrait is a book that takes the reader through many different places, eras, political landscapes, situations, and even stages of gender transition. What inspires such rich and expansive world-building in your literature?

Julia Jacques: The stories touch on topics such as gender, sex, sexuality, politics, technology, football and, to some extent, architecture. Some of them are based on real circumstances, other people’s stories and works of art. Often it is about looking at a scenario creatively and asking certain questions: Why do you write a work of fiction, for example about Christian Schad’s Self-portrait with modelor the French footballer and Nazi collaborator Alexandre Villaplane or the Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader? Why do I write a story and not an essay or a critique? Usually it is because I have questions that I am not sure of the answer to and that I think I will never know for sure. Fiction is often an interesting way to ask myself and a readership these questions.

Many of the stories in the book are also very journalistic; one of them is called A review of a return this is written as a film review. I write a lot of film reviews, so I’m certainly interested in the continuity of practice between fiction and journalism, as well as the differences. I have been interested in the boundaries between fiction and journalism, particularly as a means of exploring a fascinating set of circumstances tied to particular social and political conditions.

ADR: One of the places you often return to in your work is Brighton. How did the city become a source of creativity for you?

JJ: I grew up in a town called Hawley in Surrey. I thought it would be quite fun to set some stories there because it’s such a boring and dull place and as a teenager I couldn’t wait to get away. Many of my friends and I moved to Brighton after graduating. It was there that I found myself in terms of gender and sexuality. Brighton was quite an interesting place in the 2000s. It was rapidly gentrifying; there was a gay scene that was very different to what I had experienced elsewhere; the community was split between a more masculine and a more feminine gay culture. I spent a lot of time trying to find my way around that as a young trans woman and queer person.

There is a story in the book called A weekend in Brighton which explores my interaction with the BDSM scene there. The protagonist also has a very boring office job, just like I did back then. I tried to capture something of Brighton in 2005 – there were these music, film, queer and sex scenes that you couldn’t find anywhere else. It was a truly moving experience to rediscover memories that were buried deep in my consciousness.

“Fiction can highlight the importance of historical artifacts, historical movements, etc.” – Juliet Jacques

ADR: What I like about the book is how you draw on archives of radical and queer history. Do you think there is an interesting tension between this history as somewhat factual and its reinterpretation by contemporary writers?

JJ: I think that historicizing anything is, to a certain extent, an act of invention. I have a degree in history, which means I am aware of history as a very subjective thing. Fiction can highlight the significance of historical artifacts, historical movements, etc.The story of Nazimova is a good example of this. Alla Nazimova may not be a particularly well-known film star today, but she has a very transformative effect on the narrator, who explores her gender and dresses as a woman in public for the first time.

ADR: The book includes stories you wrote early in your career as well as more recent work. Did you notice any parallels between them that surprised you?

JJ: To put together an anthology, you need a common thread. My editor, Cipher, and I spent some time trying to figure out what that might be. Eventually we realized that all of the stories were about culture and art, some in a looser way than others. Some of them are examples of ekphratic writing, which is when the story arises from a critique of an existing work of art. Surveillance CityFor example, it is about a journalist in London who gets drawn into semi-public BDSM activities that seriously push her boundaries. Many of the character names contain hidden references to works of erotic French literature. For example, there is a reference to one of Guillaume Apollinaire’s erotic novels as well as to Alain Robbe-Grillet.

As for the political aspects of the stories, in some ways they change, in others they remain consistent. The earlier stories are probably more focused on queer and sexual freedom, while towards the end of the book they relate more to the post-Corbyn era in British politics.

“Brighton was quite an interesting place in the 2000s. It was where I found myself in terms of gender and sexuality” – Juliet Jacques

ADR: Staying with this point about the book as a collage of old and new: What does it mean for you as an author to look back and reflect?

JJ: It gives you a sense of what has changed and might change in terms of your career and general approach to literature. We have a different government now and it’s clear how I respond to that in my writing: I’m as opposed to the current government as I was to Boris Johnson’s government. I think this perceived change of power presents an interesting challenge for writers in terms of how we should respond to this new era, which I don’t think is particularly different from the last one.

Looking back is above all an opportunity to think about which styles and themes I want to deal with, how politicized the stories should be and in which direction they should go. I can imagine my work evolving from a more queer-oriented approach to a socialist one. And that’s why I think looking back is an interesting opportunity not only to look at the past but also to think about the future.

The Woman in Portrait: Collected Short Stories by Juliet Jacques is published by Cipher Press and is available now.