The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Rachel Joyce began her artistic career as an actor, not a writer. She later became a playwright for BBC Radio, creating adaptations of classic novels by authors like Henry James and the Brontë sisters. She was inspired to write The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold J. Fry after her father’s cancer diagnosis. In a Daily Mail interview, she admits that writing the novel became a way to process her grief; she felt that by writing about him, she might somehow keep him alive. Joyce also saw herself in the character of Harold, as she viewed her first attempt at writing a novel as a type of quest or pilgrimage. Like Harold, Joyce often felt she had begun a journey she might not be able to complete.

The story was originally published as a radio play in 2007 called To Be a Pilgrim and was later adapted into the novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. In the novel, Joyce intends to portray many of her father’s character traits: she views him as a man who lived a small, quotidian lifestyle that is nonetheless heroic for the way he cared for and supported his family. Joyce, believing laughter is the place where tragedy and comedy meet, also included humor in the story as an homage to her father’s witty personality.

Joyce’s father passed away before she completed the novel, mirroring the protagonist’s inability to save the people he loves. The novel ends with a dedication to Joyce’s father, and the novel as a whole can be read as a celebration of the life she shared with him. The descriptions of the landscape are inspired by her home village in the Cotswolds, and all the characters are based on real people. Joyce’s husband is originally from Kingsbridge, where the novel begins, and her children make an appearance in the novel. Just as Maureen pinned a map to her wall to chart her husband’s journey, Joyce used a physical map to aid her imagination in creating Harold’s epic journey.

After completing the first novel, Joyce realized she wanted to humanize the character of Queenie and let her tell her side of the story. The second novel in the trilogy, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, was released in 2014 and is a companion to the first novel. Joyce knew while writing the first novel that it was in some ways Maureen’s story and wanted her character to have her own book at some point. In 2022, a decade after the publication of the first novel, Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North completed the trilogy. What began as a way for Joyce to process her grief became an international bestselling trilogy published in three dozen languages.