Natasha Walter is the author of two nonfiction books, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism and The New Feminism. She also founded and directs the charity Women for Refugee Women, which helps female asylum seekers in the UK. A Quiet Life is her first novel and follows the double life of a spy’s wife during the cold war.

What made you turn to fiction after a career in feminist and nonfiction writing?
I had started working on the idea for this novel as nonfiction. I wrote an article for the Guardian about Melinda Maclean [the wife of Cambridge spy Donald Maclean], and when I went on reading about her, I had in the back of my mind that I was going to write a biography about the women around the Cambridge spies.

When did it dawn on you that it was going to be a novel?
I found myself daydreaming about this woman who stopped being the real Melinda Maclean and became somebody else and I saw these scenes around her. But it took me a long time to find a voice for it.

Did you find the writing process was very different?
Yes. It’s so much less conscious – it’s almost like breathing. And the process of editing was so different as well, because when I’m writing my nonfiction books I’m quite open to it, but of course it’s very different when it’s a story that you’ve invented. When someone’s saying: “I’m not quite sure why”, you think: do I want to clarify that or is that telling me that I need to deepen the mystery around it?

Interestingly, your main character in A Quiet Life, Laura, is not a feminist.
She isn’t. I wanted to explore someone who was quiet, held back, powerless in many ways. There are times in your life – maybe not so much for young women now, but definitely when I was young – when you are idealistic and you invest a lot in your encounters, romantic and political, and then you move on from them. And I wondered what would happen if you weren’t able to move on, if the person you were got stuck. I loved creating and living with Laura, but towards the end it was sometimes claustrophobic being in her consciousness. If I do write another novel, the woman I’d like to explore in that has more energy and can affect her surroundings more. It’s odd, talking about the novel. Writing nonfiction, editing nonfiction and talking about nonfiction all happen in the same rational part of your mind. But writing fiction and editing or talking about it happen in totally different places.

What is your life like as a writer? Do you have a writer’s routine?
Because I run a charity, and also have children, I don’t have one of those perfect writer’s dens where I can just go to my desk as soon as I get up and write through the day. I did take a six-month sabbatical for this book and then I really had a writer’s routine and it was wonderful. I wrote a lot at the British Library. I love the quiet and the sense of other people’s concentration.

What are your literary influences?
Partly because of the period this book is set in, and partly because those are the writers I love, I’d say that Evelyn Waugh or Nancy Mitford definitely played a part in the way I heard some of the characters. But it’s hard to answer – I admire so many great women fiction writers now. I’ll read anything that Zadie Smith, or Curtis Sittenfeld, or so many extraordinary women writers write. But I’ll never compare myself to them.

You are now more focused on your charity, Women for Refugee Women.
Yes. I started it 10 years ago and it gradually grew and I left journalism to one side. As a feminist, the kind of work I used to do – commentary and writing – has become so contested now, and I’m not comfortable anymore. I think it’s become quite a difficult space to operate in, for women. And I really love being able to work in a way where it’s all about enabling women, campaigning and working with them. For me, it’s liberating to be able to put my feminism into action that way, rather than being another feminist commentator who always has to watch their mouth. If you’d told me 20 years ago that I would stop writing so much about feminism I wouldn’t really have seen it, but I think [my current job] is much more me. I see how other feminists get so caught up in the arguments, and it often feels not that productive. I feel quite glad, in a way, to be out of journalism, because I think my particular voice is not particular anymore, and it’s important that more diverse voices come through now.

Almost 20 years ago, The New Feminism was published, and the reaction to it was horribly vitriolic. Are you a bit more optimistic about feminism now?
There’s so much more debate and activism going on, and it’s wonderful that there’s so many young women who take those debates for granted, that makes me feel really hopeful. There’s masses of work to be done, but I feel that there are so many people fighting this fight that it’s not going to go away now. In the past, when feminism rose, you felt like it would fall again, because it was always on the whims of male editors, male gatekeepers. There’s been this explosion of discussion – it’s been enormous, huge, completely unpredictable to me and really exciting.

A Quiet Life is published by HarperCollins (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.99