\u201cThe world which men have made isn\u2019t working,\u201d is how Blackie opens her 2019 memoir, If Women Rose Rooted. \u201cTo change the world, we women need first to change ourselves \u2013 and then we need to change the stories we tell about who we are.\u201d 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\u2019s books are something of a secret among a growing, largely female, readership across the world (as evidenced by rapturous quotes on the covers). But\u00a0the 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.<\/p>\n
double quotation markWhen you\u2019re faced with an existential crisis you\u2019ve got to get on with your life\u00a0\u2013 fairytales tell\u00a0you how<\/p>\n
Never have we needed fairytales more than now, Blackie says, over tea and cake in her elegant sitting room. \u201cThe 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\u2019s all right for five minutes, but then you\u2019ve got to get on with your life. And fairytales tell you how.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her new book, Ripening, was written almost as a guidebook for our times. \u201cThe fairytale heroine always leaves home with catastrophe snapping at her heels,\u201d she explains. \u201cThey\u2019re 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.\u201d Blackie is not interested in updating these stories for the modern reader. We don\u2019t need fairytales about girls with smartphones glued to their hands, she argues in Ripening. \u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cvery much more likely to rescue than be rescued\u201d. The heroine\u2019s journey is one of young women discovering their agency through courage, grit and wit.<\/p>\n
Blackie is determined to push back against the wicked stepmother and evil-witch tropes, to restore the \u201cwise old woman\u201d to her rightful place at the heart of society. Frustrated that all the well-known mythical women belong to Greek and Roman legends \u2013 \u201craped\u00a0left,\u00a0right and centre, and always secondary to men\u201d \u2013 she set out to explore the Celtic folklore of her half-Irish, half-Scottish ancestry. \u201cI discovered all these different ways of being a really interesting and useful old woman,\u201d she says. \u201cWhy does nobody know about\u00a0them?\u201d<\/p>\n
Her favourite mythical being is the Cailleach<\/a> (\u201cold woman\u201d or hag in Scottish and Irish Gaelic), associated with winter and wilderness and as old as the land itself. \u201cA very powerful role model for the challenges we face today,\u201d she says. But the Selkie, a seal woman who is stranded out of water and has her skin stolen, or the miller\u2019s 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 \u2013 the message of Blackie\u2019s books is clear: be ready for \u201cthe Call\u201d, which is most likely to come when you fear your story might be over.<\/p>\n She wrote Hagitude \u2013 \u201chags with attitude\u201d \u2013 when she was approaching 60, because she couldn\u2019t see a place for older women in contemporary culture. \u201cI\u00a0didn\u2019t know who I was supposed to be, and I wasn\u2019t ready to give up. I was just starting,\u201d she says. Her first \u2013 \u201cembarrassingly autobiographical\u201d \u2013 novel, The Long Delirious Burning Blue<\/a>, came out in 2008 when she was\u00a046. 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n While Blackie welcomes this new openness, she worries that too much of the conversation is about hanging on to one\u2019s youth. \u201cIf you try to cling on to a stage of life that has passed, it\u2019s not functional,\u201d she says. \u201cWe don\u2019t tell women that \u2018Yes, 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.\u2019 Oestrogen is the nurturing hormone. It\u2019s the one that keeps you nice and wanting you to take care of people. And it\u2019s gone. So what happens? You think, \u2018OK, my whole life is not about being nice.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201cnot-to-be-messed-with elders\u201d recalled \u201cthe feisty old matriarchs\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 \u201cGo figure!\u201d 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\u00a0years 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. \u201cWhen you grow up with an alcoholic mother and in poverty, you never feel quite safe,\u201d she says. \u201cI needed a job.\u201d<\/p>\n In her mid-30s, living in Kentucky and on her \u201cthird midlife crisis\u201d, she woke up one morning and thought, \u201cI\u2019m frightened of life.\u201d 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\u2019s licence was the turning point, breaking the spell. \u201cIt changed everything,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was that sense of, OK, if I can do that, then I can do\u00a0anything.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 (\u201ckind of having his own midlife crisis\u201d). Together they set up a publishing company, Two Ravens Press, which, among other Scottish titles, published Alasdair Gray\u2019s 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. \u201cThere is only you, the sea and the sky,\u201d 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 \u201ca grand love affair that couldn\u2019t last for ever\u201d.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1784057290_42_500.jpg\")
<\/p>\n