The author of five acclaimed novels and two collections of short stories, Hadley has been likened to Elizabeth Bowen and Alice Munro. Her sixth novel, The Past, is about a group of siblings who spend three long weeks at their grandparents old house, its memory-littered rooms conspiring to bring long-buried (and not-so-long-buried) tensions to the surface. Hadley, who did not publish her first novel until she was 46, teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.

Does a novel start with character rather than plot for you?
Yes, but not with individuals. It’s to do with shape. Let me show you a postcard: it’s a picture of a maquette by Barbara Hepworth [one of the artist’s “family groups”]. I saw it and I thought, that looks like a novel. So The Past came to me as a family gathering in a particular house, in a particular place. After that, the joy is in imagining: who are these people?

Your novels often reveal the competitiveness of families, whether spoken or unspoken, don’t they?
I write rather successful families. They’re not catastrophically dysfunctional. But, yes, that’s what life is like. It isn’t full of sweet concord; it’s a complicated business of dealing with the fact that you don’t love these people all the time and – this a much more grownup thing – that they don’t love you all the time, either.

Your dialogue is so natural. Do you scribble down things you overhear?
No, because dialogue isn’t anything like life, which is full of “ums” and “aahs” and incoherent nonsense. Elizabeth Bowen is brilliant on this: on the idea that it is very fake, and yet also represents some essence of how people talk to each other. One of the things you must do is not make people too articulate or clear about what they really mean. No one ever says: “What I’m feeling about you at the moment is this.” Actually, they have a quarrel about something they’ve read in the paper, but underneath something else is going on. It is really difficult. It took me such a long time: all those decades, failing. But eventually, you learn to trust yourself.

What do you make of the modern reader’s frequent demand that characters be “likable”?
I wonder what those readers would make of a book in which everybody really was nice. Nothing would happen. You need friction to get a story going. Friction is what we are. None of us are that nice, or good, and if you can’t get that down, it isn’t true. There is a deeper issue, though. We might not want characters to be saintly or sweet, but we want to engage in them in some way. I have read books where I’ve disliked a character and so couldn’t like the book. If I own up, I can’t really read Philip Roth: I find myself so violently at odds with his protagonists.

I think of your novels – Clever Girl, especially – as feminist. How important is it to you to articulate the female experience?
It’s really important, but not out of virtue or duty: I just think it is so interesting. Women’s experience is very different to what it was 50 years ago, but it is as if writing hasn’t caught up with that. In thought and culture, you’re often moving in and around the furniture of 50 years before. What could be more fascinating than women post the 60s and 70s working and having careers, and not everything ending in courtship?

Why aren’t so-called domestic novels more valued? Why do we think they’re less important than a novel about, say, Afghanistan?
It’s complicated because there are lots of good readers for whom that isn’t the case. But yes, somehow we still feel that male thought is more serious. We have a hierarchy in which abstract thought is more serious than thought about the private life. But then, annoyingly, when men write books about domesticity they’re praised enormously for it, as if it’s a huge breakthrough. In those struggling years when I was trying and failing to write, I did start books about the miner’s strike or French political prisoners in the 1870s – that one sounds like a Booker prize winner even as I say it. But they were other people’s books, not mine. In the end, it’s a necessity: you write what you can. You have this key, you open this door, and of course it’s this place where you’re at home. So it isn’t really a choice – though I don’t mean I’d rather be writing something else, because I wouldn’t: this is what I have to say.

You teach creative writing. That must mean that you do believe people can be taught to write fiction.
Well, I did a creative writing MA myself – the very one that I now teach. It was incredibly new: this was the early 90s, and I was in my late 30s [until this point, Hadley had been working as a teacher, and bringing up her three sons]. It helped me enormously. Instead of just being weird and alone, I suddenly had an audience. Your tutors can’t teach you to write, but they can read you well, and in response to that you write better. I think that’s how the courses work. Your voice not going into the void: that’s so formative.

Do you feel you’re coming into your prime as a writer?
I can do more, yes. I’m getting more daring. I feel I’ve got the novel’s rhythm now, and that’s exciting. But, oh God, this sounds like pride before a fall. And you know, I wouldn’t change having had that 20 years of nobody listening to me. I think it’s rather good to know what it’s like for nobody to take any notice of you. I feel very lucky. I could go around thinking: why wasn’t I shortlisted for such-and-such? But life is a bit short for that. There’s that famous story of Edith Wharton telling Henry James that she bought her big car with the proceeds of her last novel, and him pointing at a wheelbarrow and saying: “I bought this with mine.” Not to compare myself to Henry James, but posterity is the only test, and you can’t worry about that as you’re writing.

The Past is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). Click here to order a copy for £12.99