Catherine Coldstream in conversation with writer, priest, and broadcaster, Marie-Elsa Bragg.
We meet on Zoom. It is the height of the spring heatwave, and Lockdown is well underway. The four walls of our homes are becoming newly and differently familiar to us, as creative ways of dealing with confinement emerge from this enforced retreat. For Marie-Elsa the experience is both old and new. As a writer and contemplative, she is used to creative solitude. As a fell walker, part of her belongs in the great outdoors. Daughter of the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, and French artist and writer Marie-Elisabeth Roche, Marie-Elsa tells us about her many-layered heritage, and of how both faith and writing have been interwoven at a deep level in her life. In so doing, she takes us beyond our own four walls and out into the wide-open spaces of her beloved Cumbrian landscape, and, from there, into the equally open vistas of her extraordinary inner life. Marie-Elsa is ahead of me with the technology, and, while I sit and puzzle at the still fuzz-grey screen on my laptop, her voice appears, like a presence in the room, and then there she is, elegant and poised in her London study.