Janice Galloway: 'The ultimate sin is to stand in a man's light'

Sex, death and power," sighs Janice Galloway on a rainy Glasgow morning, mug of tea in her hand. "Unless I'm zeroing straight in on sex, death and power, I really can't be arsed." A provocative invocation of this unholy trinity by an author many have labelled in the box marked "urban, Scottish and female" will be the least of the surprises Galloway is about to spring on the reading public. There is always something exciting about witnessing the move of a writer into another sphere, on to another level. It is the kind of move that takes you along with them.

At this moment, however, Galloway is moving nowhere. She is settled comfortably in an easy chair in her chaotic study with musical scripts, testaments to her most recent book, lying on the floor. We have just finished discussing her work schedule – beginning at 11pm and ending at 4am because "I'm a single parent, I have one child and basically I'm his pal more than his mum, and I don't want to let any of that go. So I don't want to turn him away from the work room if he wants to come and play or if he wants to join in with me. I'm flattered if he wants to join in with me, that'll go away soon enough."

It is a choice she has made – "this is a job, writing is a job" – and one that has some resonance with her latest work. Entitled simply Clara (Jonathan Cape, £10.99), it is a novelised account of the life of Clara Schumann: wife of the 19th-century composer Robert Schumann, who was to end his days in an asylum, mother to their eight children, celebrated pianist and composer in her own right. A grand-themed book, it questions Romanticism's assumptions that art and madness are opposite sides of the same coin; challenges history's preference for shining its light on those troubled male geniuses. If Clara Schumann's reputation in classical music, greater in her lifetime than her husband's, has been cast in the shade by such a light, then Galloway is the one to turn a great mega-watt bulb in her direction.

"Clara passionately wants a life," Galloway says, "but she can't have a life without trying to mend [Robert's] life too, and she makes that choice I hope contemporary women recognise as well. I don't think Clara Schumann is a product of a different age; women in general, because they're more obviously tied to biology, tend to confront the same problems – about fertility, about what you do with the kids. And she confronts what we think of as a modern dilemma: my work or my kids? And not only that, my work or my kids or my man? And the choice she makes is to look after him and not them."

This privileging of the inner life does not ignore the public face of Clara Schumann, who kept her family going by performing often punishing schedules, travelling around Europe to play in front of kings and emperors. But Galloway's main focus is unrepentantly private, female-focused.

"There are certain things that are meant to be interesting, serious subjects for literature." Galloway is an impassioned speaker, emphasising words you can almost see capitalised: "War and peace, the movements of government, politics, the lives of men, basically. So I'm trying consistently to subvert that by saying – this is the sideline and the sideline is now the middle, this is what's interesting: the birthing of children, the rearing of children, holding your marriage together if remotely possible, nurturing people and trying to be a 'Good Girl', while making sure there's money to put food on the table – writing that is interesting, and serious, and difficult."

Galloway's portrayal of Clara the "Good Girl" is a beautifully written study in human control and endurance, a symphony to the quiet suffering and suppression of selfish impulses that many gifted women tolerated for the sake of lesser, or equally gifted, partners. "Clara saves her Good Girl-ness," Galloway continues. "We mustn't stand in men's light – the ultimate sin is to stand in a man's light. She literally chooses to be his right hand instead. She will reconstruct: he will create, but she will recreate. She also procreates and somehow creates as well. It's her endurance that I find so moving".

Her portrayal of Clara reminds me of Willa Muir, wife of the poet and translator Edwin Muir, I tell her, and of the howl of frustration Willa's diary records when Edwin refuses publicly to acknowledge the contribution she has made to his work.

"Yes," says Galloway, "it is not a poor impulse to wish to help someone else, that is many women's impulse in relationships. The problem is that it is seen as a weakness, and to want to insist on being acknowledged? One of women's failings is trying to be nice. It matters to be good, to be seen to be good."

Is Janice Galloway, like Clara Schumann, a "Good Girl"? The question hangs in the air. Galloway is happy enough to talk about her background, and her mother's hopes for a better future for her daughter: "I studied Baroque and Elizabethan music at school; my mother was very much of the opinion that that wasn't for me! She wanted me to get a job at Boots: she had worked at a mill till her fingers bled, she wanted me to have something better, but not that much better thank you very much!"

She will not be drawn, however, on comparisons with Clara, wife of a mentally troubled man, who has to make a decision about her own creative ability and her duties as wife and mother. Galloway sidesteps any attempt to delve further into the later part of her own life. At one point, her now ex-husband's private difficulties made the public pages of a Scottish tabloid, which hinted at mental instabilities. All Galloway will say is that yes, she too is trying to create, and trying to live a life and run a house, and how do you do all that?

It is undeniable that much of the emotional power of Clara, and Clara and Robert's relationship, comes from lived experience. "How could it not?" Galloway demands. "Where else do you get things from if not from life? I've got a sense of mission about this: I've known a lot of people come up for concerts and because music has drag in it, it seems distant and lofty, full of strange people with no connection to the real world. But musicians, composers, artists – they're just folk and they're doing essential things in the world, as essential as making chairs or growing wheat. They're people with lives, and work comes out of life. Where else does it come from?"

Galloway's democratising notions of art have been reinforced by the experience of writing about a 19th-century female composer. "I'm just trying to make the grand small enough," she says, "to put it into people's hands so that it feels containable, so they can say, 'This can be mine.' " She pauses for a moment. "If I had never met my music teacher, Ken Hetherington [to whom Clara is dedicated], I would never have ended up doing this job and I'd have missed a great deal."

In bringing Clara Schumann to a new audience, Galloway is singing a new tune, making new music. It may be different from anything she has composed before, but fans need not be daunted. "I'm only here, doing this, because someone took the trouble to say to me once: this can be yours," she says. "It's not just for other people."

Janice Galloway - Biography

Janice Galloway was born in Saltcoats on the west coast of Scotland in 1956. Her alcoholic and abusive father separated from her mother, the second of seven children from a northern English mining family, when Janice was four. She was raised by her mother in an attic room above the doctor's surgery that her mother cleaned, until her father's death two years later meant a move back to the home of her birth. She studied music and English at Glasgow University and became a teacher, but left the profession after 10 years in 1989, on publication of her first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing. She attended the writers' class at Glasgow University alongside other Glasgow authors such as James Kelman. Once married, she now lives with her son in Glasgow. The Trick is to Keep Breathing was followed by Blood in 1991, Foreign Parts in 1994 and Where You Find It in 1996. She has published many short stories and this year, Monster, her libretto of Mary Shelley's life set to music by composer Sally Beamish, was performed. Clara is published by Cape on 20 June.