Piranesi Study Guide

Susanna Clarke is a British author best known for her two novels, Johnathon Strange & Mr. Norrell, published in 2004, and Piranesi, published in 2020. She was born in 1959 in Nottingham England as the eldest daughter of a Methodist minister and his wife. Due to her father’s position, she traveled frequently during her childhood and read many classic works of literature. She earned a degree in philosophy, politics and economics in 1981 from St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. After graduating, she worked for eight years at the publishing houses Quarto and Gordon Fraser. From there, she taught English abroad for two years and returned to England in 1992. There, she began work on her first novel, Johnathon Strange and Mr. Norrell, a novel which took her 10 years to complete. During this time, she worked as a cookbook editor for Simon & Schuster, publishing occasional short stories on the side. After a long search, Clarke sold her manuscript to Bloomsbury in 2003 and it was published the next year. The story, a fantastical alternative history set in 19th-century England, was an immediate critical and commercial success. In 2006, she published a collection of eight fairy tales titled, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. Abandoning her ambitious plans for a sequel to Johnathon Strange & Mr. Norrell, Clarke decided to work on a simpler project, Piranesi. She currently lives with her husband Colin Greenland, a fellow fantasy writer. 

Piranesi is set in the late 2000s, a time of great technological transition and upheaval. This is reflected not only in the novel’s anxieties about the dangers of new, escapist worlds (i.e., the internet and social media) but also the broader societal and psychological impact of technology’s increasingly central role to human life and society. Clarke was inspired to write Piranesi by a series of 16 etchings by the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The series, called Carceri d’invenzione, or Imaginary Prisons, portray huge underground vaults with disappearing staircases, massive machines, and busts and statues in several prints. Piranesi first published the series in 1750. The original included 14 untitled prints, and the reworked series (which were numbered and included an additional two etchings) were then published in 1761. Imaginary Prisons has also inspired artists like M. C. Escher (who is famous for his depictions of geometrically impossible architecture and disappearing staircases), musicians like Yo-Yo Ma, and even possibly author Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

Piranesi is rich with allusions to other texts, many of which share common themes and fantasy devices. One such story is the classic fantasy series by C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia. Like Piranesi, these stories are set in an alternative world, one which boasts an entirely different set of rules than the normal world. Narnia, for instance, not only has magic and talking animals, but it also induces amnesia in any newcomers. Like Matthew Sorensen, the Pevensie children lose all memory of their past life upon entering the wardrobe into Narnia. Piranesi also draws strong parallels to the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, particularly “the Library of Babel” and “The House of Asterion.” The first details a library with infinite rooms and books, while the second retells the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur from the perspective of the Minotaur, who yearns to escape his “infinite house.” Like Piranesi, these short stories deal with questions of infinity, particularly in relation to architecture. Lastly, Piranesi has often been compared with Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, particularly in its conception of a “distributary world.”