As she prepares for the celebration of Easter, a debut novelist describes how characters from literature mingle in her imagination with scenes from the Gospels

This year I will be returning to Cumbria for Holy Week. There will be traditional rituals and familiar ways of coming together. Simnel cake; daffodils in prayer books; the first hike with our new palms; time by the fire, gazing, reading; maybe a confessional chat.

Evening vigils and Stations of the Cross will be prepared for and sat with. And we might even try to galvanise the nieces and nephews to boil eggs in brown paper and vinegar so they can be painted and rolled down the hill on Easter Sunday.
In my personal devotions, images from novels will be alongside scenes from the Gospels. On the Via Dolorosa I will see characters such as Thomas Hardy’s Fanny Robin, limping, pregnant, hoping to meet the father of her child in Casterbridge, and Jude, walking to Oxford as if it were the Promised Land. And George Eliot’s Silas Marner, in search of a new home after being accused of theft.

Also stumbling with his cross is Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Smith, so affected by the death of his friend Evans in the First World War that he stumbles into park bushes seeing visions of him. And Greene’s unnamed priest, burdened with his calling, troubled and thirsty in the Mexican heat. These images return to me each year. The ambivalent entanglements with questions of faith and suffering of these characters always encourage me to once again face the painfully open walk to Calvary.
My novel Towards Mellbreak is about a hill-farming family in the Cumbrian fells whose culture and way of life is threatened by the rapid social changes of the final three decades of the last century. Some readers will notice that the days of Holy Week gently underpin each chapter, which build up towards an Easter vision at dawn, though it is possible to read the novel and not see this at all.