Susanna Mary Clarke (born 1 November 1959) is an English author best known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), a Hugo Award-winning alternative history.

Both Clarke's debut novel and her short stories are set in a magical England and written in a pastiche of the styles of 19th-century writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.

[2][3] Owing to her father's posts, she spent her childhood in various towns across Northern England and Scotland,[4] and enjoyed reading the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen.

[4] Clarke first developed the idea for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell while she was teaching in Bilbao: "I had a kind of waking dream ... about a man in 18th-century clothes in a place rather like Venice, talking to some English tourists.

From this she extracted "The Ladies of Grace Adieu", a fairy tale about three women secretly practising magic who are discovered by the famous Jonathan Strange.

Clarke learned of these events when Nielsen Hayden called and offered to publish her story in his anthology Starlight 1 (1996), which featured pieces by well-regarded science-fiction and fantasy writers.

[15] Clarke, admitting that the project was for herself and not for the reader,[16] "clung to this method" "because I felt that if I went back and started at the beginning, [the novel] would lack depth, and I would just be skimming the surface of what I could do.

[21] It has been described as a fantasy novel, an alternative history, and an historical novel and draws on various Romantic literary traditions, such as the comedy of manners, the Gothic tale, and the Byronic hero.

[30][31][32] The volume's focus on "female mastery of the dark arts" is reflected in the ladies of Grace Adieu's magical abilities and the prominent role needlework plays in saving the Duke of Wellington and Mary, Queen of Scots.

"[34] The title story, "The Ladies of Grace Adieu", is set in early 19th-century Gloucestershire and concerns the friendship of three young women, Cassandra Parbringer, Miss Tobias, and Mrs. Fields.

[36] In her review of the volume in Strange Horizons, Victoria Hoyle writes that "there is something incredibly precise, clean, and cold about Clarke's portrayal of 'women's magic' in this story (and throughout the collection)—it is urgent and desperate, but it is also natural and in the course of things.

"[37] The collection received many positive reviews, though some critics compared the short stories unfavourably with the highly acclaimed and more substantial Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

Hoyle wrote in her review that "the stories ... are consistently subtle and enchanting, and as charismatic as any reader could wish, but, while the collection has the panache of the novel, it lacks its glorious self-possession.

"[37] When she began writing her next book, Clarke was living in Cambridge with her partner, the science fiction novelist and reviewer Colin Greenland.

[38] She was, in 2004, working on a book that begins a few years after Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell ends and which would involve characters who, as Clarke said, are "a bit lower down the social scale".

[41] Clarke found that writing the sequel to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was becoming too complex considering her illness, and she returned instead to an earlier project with fewer characters and requiring less research – which became her second novel.

This list contains the first publication of each as well as first appearance of "John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner" in her collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories.