Julia Armfield Reimagines King Lear in a Drowning World

How does Shakespeare’s King Lear resonate in a world facing climate catastrophe? Novelist Julia Armfield explores this question in Private Rites, a novel set in a near-future London reshaped by rising sea levels. Following three sisters grappling with their father’s death, Private Rites weaves together themes of inheritance, power, and familial wounds—echoing Shakespeare’s tragic monarch while carving out a distinctly modern, queer perspective.

Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea, discusses her fascination with disaster narratives, the inescapable dynamics of sibling relationships, and how Shakespeare’s work inspires her storytelling. From the storm in King Lear to the watery depths of her fiction, she reflects on how queerness, horror, and the climate crisis intersect in literature.

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Julia Armfield is a fiction writer living in London with her wife and cat. Her work has been published in Granta, The White Review, and Best British Short Stories in 2019 and 2021. In 2019, she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. She was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award in 2018 and won the White Review Short Story Prize in 2018 and a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She is the author of salt slow, a collection of short stories, which was longlisted for the Polari Prize in 2020 and the Edge Hill Prize in 2020. Her debut novel, Our Wives Under The Sea,  was shortlisted for the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2022 and won the Polari Prize in 2023. Her second novel, Private Rites, was longlisted for the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize in 2024.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published March 11, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music plays]

FARIM-COOPER: In her novel Private Rites, the writer Julia Armfield imagines a near-future in which sea level rise and constant rains have inundated some of the world’s largest cities. London is an archipelago, connected by ferries and intermittent bus service. The wealthy live in high-rises or on hillsides. The poor barricade themselves as best they can.

In this world, three sisters reckon with the death of their father, a famous architect. He’d been imperious and abusive, so their reactions have less to do with grief than with figuring out how to move forward.

And, as you may have guessed, the parallels to King Lear run deep.

Private Rites is Armfield’s second novel. Her first, Our Wives Under the Sea, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and received the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror and Best Debut Novel. It was named one of the best books of the year by NPR and the Washington Post.

Here’s Julia Armfield, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BOGAEV: You clearly get what siblings, or maybe especially sisters, are like. But was the jumping off point for this book: sisters, or Lear, or just living as we all do on the knife edge of environmental catastrophe?

ARMFIELD: Oh man, that’s a very good question. I think it was actually probably sisters for me. I think I wanted to write about sisters. I always—I love to write about siblings.

I’m fascinated by the curious trap of the nuclear family and the patterns that people get stuck in. And the damage that people continue to do to one another, often really without any sense of control over themselves as they do it.

So I think I wanted to write about siblings and sisters. And I wanted to write about three sisters, particularly, because that would allow me to tackle something which I’m really fascinated in, which is birth order.

I always say that I don’t believe in star signs. I don’t believe in personality tests. But if you tell me your birth order, I know everything about you. And so, three is kind of the perfect number for that because you can do an older, and a middle, and a younger.

BOGAEV: You have siblings. What are you?

ARMFIELD: I have a younger brother, and I am the most older sister, I think, it is possible for someone to be, personally. But that’s also a very older sister thing to say.

But as a sideline, I’ve realized this really quite recently that, like, almost every single one of my close friends is an older sister, with just a few only-child outliers. So, I don’t know whether that is sort of natural selection or what’s going on there, but it’s very weird.

But yes. Anyway, so, I wanted to write about three sisters and a father. And I suppose quite quickly that made me realize that the Lear parallels were going to exist whether or not I wanted to grapple with them.

And I do think that ultimately, it’s a very poor, sort of, writer who doesn’t choose to consider the things that have come before them and the things that have influenced them. Because, you know, there are seven stories in the world and we’re all writing and rewriting the same thing.

And so, when I realized that Lear was sort of paratextually going to exist with this novel, whatever I did, I started thinking about what it is that Lear is about to me. I think that Lear is about inheritance and Lear is about abuse. And those are two things that I am very centrally interested in with this novel.

I think also it’s something I’ve never been particularly interested in, is the concept of, sort of, reclaiming stories and, like, “I’m going to do this or that.” But, like, from a female perspective. I don’t think that that is… I think it’s a very pat attitude to take towards culture.

But at the same time, something that I thought was quite interesting in the way that I was, sort of, able to look at this trope, so to speak. Was that obviously with Lear, that’s a story where the father is almost never offstage. Whereas the sisters, even Cordelia, you lose her for like a huge swathe of the middle of the play.

And so, I thought that it would be interesting in a sort of flipping telescope sense to think about what would happen to that narrative if the sisters were basically never offstage?

And the father in Private Rites does not appear on the page in real-time. He is dead from the outset. It’s not a spoiler. That’s just what happens on the first page. And it was, therefore, very interesting to me the way that kind of squeezed the dynamic in a different direction, I think.

BOGAEV: That is so interesting. So, Lear came in kind of the back door, it sounds like. And it’s more of like a… something that permeates your text rather than an adaptation. I’m just curious, were you influenced by any specific performances of Lear or were you reading the book?

ARMFIELD: There was—I cannot remember what year it was—but there was a national theatre production of King Lear, which was, it was Simon Russell Beale as King Lear. It was, Anna Maxwell Martin was in it. Olivia Vinall was in it. Kate Fleetwood, I think, as well.

And I think something about it was… it wasn’t particularly overt, but there was a very, very, very tangible mafia flavor to it. There were often horrible things going on in people’s wine cellars, that kind of thing.

And it really spoke to something about the family to me. The mob-like, cult-like, inescapable nature of family, particularly family as presented in Lear. That was something I was thinking about a lot.

BOGAEV: Okay, so you were thinking about that. And whenever you read or watch Lear, are you especially attuned to the sisters? You know, are you making up their backstories? Why they hate Cordelia so much or why they turn on each other?

ARMFIELD: I think you just would hate Cordelia so much, really, wouldn’t you? Just be like, “Oh, for goodness’ sake, just get on.” Seriously, I can’t help it.

BOGAEV: That’s the older sister in you.

ARMFIELD: It is.

BOGAEV: That’s why you don’t have younger sister friends.

ARMFIELD: You’re so right, it’s me. Goneril and Regan actually did nothing wrong.

Yeah, I think it is so interesting to me the way that you see them in some productions. Goneril and Regan and this sort of ugly sister trope. And this place where they’ve been pushed.

It’s really fascinating to me to, sort of, view the production with that in mind. The fact that people are consistently being pushed into roles by family and being pushed into roles by the way that they are placed together and placed against each other. So yeah, I think it’s definitely something that is on my mind.

BOGAEV: Well, like Lear, your daughters, they don’t have mothers. They’re from two separate mothers, but they’re absent mothers. And the father’s absent too, so they’re kind of orphaned. But the older ones, they keep trying to stand in as mothers for each other.

ARMFIELD: Yeah, I think that’s true.

BOGAEV: Is that a sister dynamic that you have felt as well?

ARMFIELD: I don’t know that it’s necessarily one I’ve felt, but it’s certainly something that I have seen and experienced the impulse towards.

There’s something about Isla, who is the older sister in this novel. She has this conception of herself as someone who is both mothering her sisters and also looking after her sisters in a more general way. But that is not actually, necessarily a way of extending grace to people because she resents the role consistently.

BOGAEV: And they don’t want it.

ARMFIELD: And they don’t want it. And she has this whole vibe of being like—that very older sister thing of being like, “Well, if I don’t do this, nobody else will.” And it’s like, but actually the very act of that is depriving them of the ability to do it.

BOGAEV: Yeah. Well, you’ve described the novel as, “King Lear with lesbians at the end of the world,” which is…

ARMFIELD: Yes

BOGAEV: That’s just great. And when one of your characters at one point says, “King Lear and his dyke daughters,”—all three are queer, we should say. So how or rather why did queerness enter into your concept for this three-sister story?

ARMFIELD: Oh, that’s interesting. I suppose, I mean, because my… I’ve only ever written queer literature really. It’s just what I write. And so, to some degree, I’m going to give you the very pat answer, which is that I wouldn’t know how to write anything else.

But it’s… I mean it’s never particularly addressed head on for much of the novel. But I wouldn’t say he has been good about his daughter’s queerness. I also don’t think he knows a great deal about his daughters’ queerness. And there is a sense of them, sort of, being dynastically a bit useless to him, which I’m interested in.

This is a novel set in a climate crisis, and it’s never really specified, but I always imagining it being about like 60 years hence or something. It’s been raining for a very long time. Everything is descended into this sort of soggy subsistence.

And I was thinking a lot when I was coming up with this surrounding, about what I would call kind of like, maybe a subset of the disaster genre, particularly in film of what you might call, sort of, end of the world movies.

And I was thinking about movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact. But also, like, better versions of that. I was thinking about like Melancholia. I was thinking about Take Shelter.

And something I found really interesting when I was thinking about all of those movies is how much they default to the heterosexual nuclear family. And that’s not really the case in the disaster genre more broadly. But in, like, apocalypse movies, it’s like mom, dad, kid bunker.

And so, what I was thinking about when I came up sort of with the setting of this was, “Well, what happens when everyone is queer within that genre? And what happens when the nuclear family has not been safe for you and it’s not something you want to keep safe? And what happens to that genre when you pursue it from a different angle?”

BOGAEV: That really speaks to how in queer culture you so often have been pushed out of your nuclear family, and you have to create or choose your own family. It’s almost a metaphor for that.

ARMFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And the way that you are sort of given, in some ways, despite the fact that it is often a result of abuse and often a result of bad things happening to you. There is also a freedom to that.

BOGAEV: So I was going to ask you why water? Because here I am in Los Angeles with the fires. Our other catastrophe. Our other apocalypse.

But it’s so obvious. I mean, water is such a common and a potent metaphor for queerness, fluidity. And water was central to your first novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, too. And then Lear and the storm. So, I don’t have a question. Is that why?

ARMFIELD: It’s Lear. It’s why. Water is wet. No, it’s… I was thinking about this because I get asked about water a lot because I’ve set myself up to be asked about water a lot. I wrote—I can’t remember when it was. It was a couple of years ago. I wrote an essay about queer women in the water in culture, particularly.

Because when I realized I was doing it and I kept writing these wet books, I was looking around and kind of trying to figure out why. And I realized that a lot of the sort of formative lesbian media of my youth, it was very often even just tangentially related to the water.

Of, sort of, the earlier Sarah Waters novels are often set in Whitstable by the sea. You think about the Celine Sciamma movies like Water Lilies, is about synchronized swimming. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is set by the sea as well.

And, so I suppose to an extent, whatever you inhale, you will at some point exhale. But I think also it’s related to quite a lot of the things that I am just generally interested in.

I’m interested in liminality. I’m interested in instability. And I’m interested in the idea of being one thing on the surface and another thing underneath, which I think is very, very, pertinent to the queer experience as I like to write about it. And so, I think that’s why I keep coming back to it.

But that having been said, if I do it again, I think people are going to be like, “Are you all right? Is… Do you have any other ideas?” So, I think we need to move on from water with the next one, possibly.

BOGAEV: But it is so perfect for this one. I mean, you have a historical, I guess, many critics agree that the context for Shakespeare’s play is that it’s Shakespeare’s eco-critique of ecological tyranny. And King James belief that he had personal dominion over the environment and a God given right to all the resources of the land.

So, the raging and the storm, has many dimensions in the play. And the storm you, in fact—we should say, you tell your story from the point of view of each of the characters. Each mini chapter is headlined with the name of one of the sisters.

But also, one of the characters, the only not-sister character in your book, I think, is the city. And that adds this whole other dimension of… I don’t know, it’s very poignant to hear the city’s point of view as it crumbles. What was your thinking there?

ARMFIELD: I think it was quite necessary. Really just from a practical perspective, I think. To begin with, all of the sisters, whilst their voices were so, just lively and important to me, at the same time, I was very much aware of the fact that they’re quite myopic. They’re quite self-centered and their world view is quite small.

And so, I needed the city voice. Firstly, to broaden out because the reader needed a sense of what was going on. They needed to see the downturn. They needed to see what was going on for other people, often less privileged people than these sisters.

But at the same time also, I just think the reader needed a break. Like, you’re, sort of, really deep down and these three people’s grudges for a long time. And the city was very important to me as a breather.

But it’s also… it’s interesting that you, sort of, you talk about the storm in Lear and all of that. I think I wanted something more elemental to feel like it was in charge of the storytelling as well. Do you know what I mean?

BOGAEV: It is a character in its own right. So, your other novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, also involved a catastrophe, a watery catastrophe. It was a cover up of a submarine disaster. So, are you just crazy about disaster horror? Is that what you read and what you go to watch?

ARMFIELD: It’s awful. It’s so bad because I could say to you, “No, no, absolutely not. I’m moving on from water next time,” which I am. But I’m not moving on from disaster next time. So, I’ve got no excuse whatsoever. I’m writing about a fictional mountaineering disaster next time.

BOGAEV: Oh, wow.

ARMFIELD: I know it’s terrible, but the thing I’m the most interested in is the boring things that people feel. I’m very interested in dailiness and mundanity, as it sort of butts up against extremity.

Private Rites is about the sort of insidious nature of dailiness. It is about the fact that nobody has time to react to disaster because of capitalism. Because everybody has to pay their rent. Because everybody has to go to work, and people still have to go to work. And even though everything else has disintegrated, there is somehow still a way to go to work.

And I’m very compelled with the way that disaster is sort of swept aside and also allowed to grow out of all control because people do not have time to stop it.

BOGAEV: Oh, so like a snake eating its own tail? We are helping to create the crisis because of the economic pressure that we have to deny the fact that there is a crisis.

ARMFIELD: Yeah. And because nobody—because everybody of, you know, a non-billionaire level as well has so little control. And it takes such an active stepping out of society, as it has been organized, to actually even protest anything half the time.

BOGAEV: Yeah, although you do have quite a bit of protest happening in the book. The sisters are doing some of it, one of them. And they’re looking out the window at the protesters.

And I guess, I mean, I was thinking of Lear, which is ultimately so bleak. I mean, you get to that line from Kent, you know, “Break heart, I prithee break.” It’s just, there’s nowhere to go. But you take your story, I think, in a more hopeful direction. At least for the sisters’ relationships, maybe.

ARMFIELD: I think that’s nice. I think that’s a nice way of looking at it. I don’t know whether I’m fundamentally a hopeful or a despairing writer or not. I think I am typically hopeful in terms of personal relationships, and I think that that usually spreads out to everything else. So, I think I’m hopeful with caveats, is how I would describe myself.

BOGAEV: Okay, I’m going to stop talking about my own situation in the burn zone in Los Angeles, but one more thing. I read your book right before these recent fires in L.A. and you really nailed this feeling of how do you navigate being a frog in the pot of slowly heating water?

I mean, you’re always asking yourself—or maybe trying not to ask yourself—what’s the tipping point when you just finally can’t take the heat anymore or you should flee? Or are you even able to recognize a tipping point when it comes because it’s so endless and gradual.

And like you say, you have to keep up your job. Our capitalism keeps us working a job or grocery shopping. And you’re doing your house cleaning while the world is going to hell, and at the same time you’re saying, “Why am I cleaning my house when it might burn down?” So, those were all the things you were thinking but is this something that you feel viscerally yourself in your daily life?

ARMFIELD: Well, you can tell sometimes. You know, I’m sure you’ve had this experience. Do you ever have, “I’m not going to read the news today because it’s too much news.” Even in nice ways, like when we’re like, “I’m going to have a self-care day and I’m going to make myself feel happy.” And it’s like, but that doesn’t improve anything, does it?

I’m interested in the way that people’s adaptability can be so positive and such a symptom of apathy at the same time. Because I think that happens in my novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, as well, a lot.

The fact that the main character is reacting to a terrible thing happening to her wife, but there is this baseline of just, “Got to get through the day.” Which means that she’s just sort of accepting these things happening. And I think we do that.

You know, I hate to reference COVID at any point ever anymore, but like the fact of how quickly that became normal and how quickly a new normal asserts itself is just the fact of being alive. You know what I mean?

BOGAEV: Same thing. Yeah. Okay, very practical question. There is so much weather, and hydrology, and architecture, and then the effects of flooding on buildings in this book, in a good way. What kind of research did you do for it?

ARMFIELD: Oh, not as much research as I did for Our Wives Under the Sea, actually. I think it was the key thing for me was, sort of, trying to angle my research in directions that interested me.

I’m fascinated by architecture. And I was sort of thinking about… so the dad in Private Rites is a famous architect who has sort of become very renowned for making the world navigable as it is now. But of course, actually, it’s only navigable for people who can afford.

BOGAEV: For wealthy people.

ARMFIEL: Yeah.

BOGAEV: Who can afford his amazing house that rises. It responds to the rising waters. That’s interesting. Does that exist? It made me think there must be architecture like that.

ARMFIELD: Well, a lot of this novel came from, I was in hospital several years ago for a week. And I was watching TV just like constantly because there was nothing else to do. It was boiling hot so I couldn’t sleep. And I watched an episode of Grand Designs. Which, I don’t know if you have in the US, but it’s just about people ill-advisedly doing very, very big architectural builds.

And it was this glass house, which was built on a floodplain. It didn’t have extending legs, but it was built in such a way that it rose above the water exactly at the point where the water was known to have risen to. And so, I kept that building in my head. Then I just made it slightly more futuristic when I actually came to write it.

But I suppose more broadly I was thinking about Le Corbusier. I was thinking about Mies van der Rohe and sort of people of that ilk.

And then, comparatively, I had to sort of swing to the other end of the spectrum and go, “Okay, but how would everybody else actually live in this situation where they can’t afford anything like that?”

And it made me think about the apotheosis of the high rise and the way that when that, sort of, first came about, people were all like, “Oh, well, this will foster community.”

And of course, actually, if you build people on top of people, on top of people, that doesn’t foster community. It causes community to break down because people are isolated in their little boxes. And I was really, really fascinated by,  sort of, how that would infect and affect everything in the city.

BOGAEV: Yeah, it’s… I mean, this really does bring us to the central conflict in the story, which revolves around money and around the house that the father designed. That’s Lear’s kingdom in your book.

ARMFIELD: Exactly.

BOGAEV: The father leaves the house to the youngest daughter, but before he died, he offered them all money separately. And I don’t want to give away too much, but there’s a lot of tension around who accepted the money and who didn’t. And what they think or think they know, and maybe they’re wrong.

So, there’s all this inequity. And this clear sense of an abusive figure who put the daughters in competition with each other and manipulated them with attention and money. How did you arrive at this construct for your leader figure, the father, to sow this discord among his daughters?

ARMFIELD: Wealthy parents have more of a questionable stake in their children sometimes, I think.

There’s more of a sense of their children also being products of them: things they have paid for, things they have schooled, things that they have invested in.

And so, there is a sense of ownership over the daughters as well as ownership over the house, the land, whatever you want to call it. The two things are almost synonymous.

BOGAEV: It’s their legacy, so it’s their ego reflected in, as it continues.

This makes me think, and it’s something you mentioned before, one of the characters, one of the sisters says, “At what point do we stop being the direct product of our parents? At what point does it start being our fault what we do?”

And I was imagining that you had that as a post-it note on your wall and that you’re—that was your guiding star with the entire book that you were writing towards that question.

ARMFIELD: I think I was to some degree. I think that’s one of the thoughts that came to me very early. Because there is such mixed emotion, I think, when the characters you are creating are ones who have been abused, whether subtextually or quite evidently. And also, at the same time, characters who have been very privileged and wealthy.

And at what point does that privilege cancel out that abuse? At what point does that abuse cancel out that privilege? And so, yeah, it was very, very, very crucial to me to continue to interrogate that back and forth.

BOGAEV: You do reference, though, Macbeth, directly. I really like this. Agnes, the youngest daughter, says that, “There’s always one shifty witch in Macbeth. One that never says anything useful and always just seems to be filling in space between the other two.”

I thought that was so funny, and I can’t say that I’ve noticed that. But then I looked back at the witches and just looking at Act 1, Scene 3, it seems like the second witch is just filler.

ARMFIELD: Right? And you always go to a production. And when they’re not doing something, you know, when the witch is just like a voice that’s emanating unseen from above or whatever, you usually have this one poor woman who’s got saddled with all the rubbish bits. Then there are two who are incredibly made up, and they’re like the bin bag witch, and it’s just… it’s really sad.

BOGAEV: What is your history with Shakespeare? Sounds like you go to a lot of plays.

ARMFIELD: Yeah, it’s… I suppose, I mean, it’s sort of basic. I did an English degree. I was very into English at school. I was very fortunate. I got taken to the theater a lot and then have continued to go to the theater a lot. And I live in London as well, which makes it easier to do things and see things.

So, I suppose it’s just one of those things where if you form a habit early enough, then it becomes something that you will do yourself and that becomes your own habit.

BOGAEV: On a completely different tack. Well, you started to say what, that you’re writing another disaster novel? Can you tell us more about that?

ARMFIELD: Yeah, I’m writing about a fictional mountaineering disaster in the 1990s. It’s, sort of, something terrible happened and a lot of people died. It’s about 2008 after all of that happened, and two of the survivors are contending with the fact that the other survivor has published a book which they think it does not represent what happened very well.

So, I suppose that it’s about disaster, as always. But it’s about who is allowed to own a story, and at what point does retelling a story become violent in some way?

BOGAEV: You were talking about your interest in horror, and in disaster, and in the, I guess, it’s a horror slash disaster. That’s a genre too, right? And it’s so pertinent to queerness because it’s all about transmogrification, transformation, and transgression, I guess.

ARMFIELD: Yeah, I always say horror is the gayest of all genres. That sounds like a joke, but I absolutely mean it.

Not only in the sense that of course people are interested in transgression. People are interested in subcultures where they can go and be safe and be together, all of which is completely true.

But also, from a very sort of historic, factual level. If you think about a lot of the abiding images of horror monsters, you think about, say, the Boris Karloff Frankenstein or whatever, you think about the Bela Lugosi Dracula. A lot of those movies in that time, in the sort of, like, classic universal horror, were being directed and made by queer people. You think about directors like James Whale, he was a gay man.

And so, it’s very interesting to me the way that actually there is… it’s not just subtext. It is text. And so, the way that all these, kind of, like, iconic moments of horror then of course trickle down and trickle down.

And as I said, everybody is repeating the same things forever. People are actually repeating, like, gay tropes and queer tropes forever and forever. And so, I think that it’s just it’s always the genre that I think speaks to queerness for me.

BOGAEV: And exploring otherness or insisting on otherness.

ARMFIELD: Yeah, and exploring the monster and the monstrous. And reclaiming the monster and the monstrous and all of that thing in that cycle forever I think is so, so crucial.

BOGAEV: So fun to talk to you. I don’t want to let you go, but I must. Thank you very much.

ARMFIELD: Thank you very much.

————

KARIM-COOPER: That was Julia Armfield, speaking with Barbara Bogaev.

Private Rites is out now from Flatiron Books.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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