Monday 10 July 2023 7:00 am | Updated: Monday 10 July 2023 11:09 am

Writer and businesswoman Hannah Rothschild on family, crypto, and not being a silly novelist

Deputy Comment and Features Editor

Along with being a writer, Hannah Rothschild CBE is a board member of RIT Capital Partners and Windmill Hill Asset Management and was the first woman ever to chair the board of trustees at the National Gallery. Her latest novel High Time was published in June.

“The name walks into the room long before you. So it brings baggage, for want of a better word,” Hannah Rothschild tells me. A businesswoman, philanthropist and writer, I am meeting with Hannah to talk about her latest novel High Time, but I can’t help but also ask about her extraordinary upbringing.

A primogeniture-led family, it was expected that Hannah’s brother would grow up to be active in the family businesses, but it is Hannah who now finds herself more involved as a board member of RIT Capital Partners along with a number of other roles. On top of that, Hannah has also always been a keen writer, though only turned to fiction in her fifties, something she tells me she’d always dreamed of doing but found too daunting.

Recalling memories of being briefed on how to “talk finance” at nine years old ahead of family dinners with potential donors, that finance forms the backdrop to Hannah’s latest novel High Time is no surprise, though her ability to make it quite so fun was certainly not as guaranteed. Asked whether her own experience of business has proven as exciting as her novels, punctuated by the likes of high camp swindlers and multimillion pound art hoaxes, Hannah is unequivocal in her answer – “No! Thankfully,” she tells me.

“You know, you want nice returns, you want capital preservation, you don’t necessarily want to shoot the lights out. I mean where I come from anyway. So I would say the experience in High Time is very different. And some of that comes from sitting in quite a lot of board meetings and imagining what would happen if we weren’t just always focusing on, I don’t know, what the yen is doing.”

Writing about the business world is also a means of escape from it then, though it is clear Hannah takes neither her role as writer or businesswoman lightly.

“I should say, I don’t want to sound pompous, but I do take the positions I have on boards very, very seriously. Because it is, it’s very serious business… As I say, in my kind of writing world, I think that’s nice, I can have an alternate existence,” she says.

Yet Hannah proves as scrupulous about her writing as she is about business. Hannah knows she can’t pull one on her readers, she tells me, and is meticulous about the details. Cryptocurrency, which finds a surprising place at the heart of her latest novel, is something Hannah didn’t understand when she started writing her pitch.

“I didn’t get it. And then you might say, well why on earth would you write about it? Well, I think I did it because I wanted to understand it,” she tells me.

Speaking to investors, foraging through chat rooms, Hannah says she taught herself about cryptocurrency “right from the bottom up” to ensure she got the details right. Will she be investing with her newfound knowledge? “Emperor’s new clothes,” she tells me. “Though I think it’s here to stay, I should add.”

Another world that makes its way into High Time that Hannah is no stranger to is that of art. Becoming the first woman to chair the board of trustees of the National Gallery in its 200-year history in 2015 – a role she applied for after seeing an ad in The Guardian – Hannah does not shrug off the significance of the appointment.

“It was both a bit shocking, frankly, but also quite important and I felt an enormous responsibility to get it right in inverted commas. Because if you are going to break a glass ceiling and be the first person in whatever it might be to take a job, you’ve got to do it right. That was an added pressure,” she says.

While being a woman in business was and still is challenging, as I talk to Hannah it is clear that pigeonholing is not only reserved to the world of finance. High Time does not shy away from serious issues, especially the repercussions of business, but it is also a fun, fast-paced and, God forbid, funny novel written by a woman – a combination that can be ripe to characterisations as silly or frivolous.

Asked whether she thinks such categorisations undersell her writing, Hannah tells me she does.

“There’s a mismatch there to be honest in what I’m trying to do and how I think it’s been sold… I’d like it to be presented differently. But you do have to listen to what the pros say.”

Hannah continues: “I mean, what I’m trying to do is not write a silly novel… So although it’s funny, I hope it’s not silly… and if I’ve failed, then I failed. And I have to own that. And when people say oh, it’s like Jilly Cooper, and I think Jilly Cooper is brilliant, but that’s not who I want to be.”

Indeed, with its sharp wit and multi-generational cast of charming but quirky relatives, Hannah’s novels stray far closer to the likes of Nancy Mitford in its tone and style. And while the thrills and high drama of finance played out in her novels may be pure fiction, what about the eccentric family who star? Not quite. “No shortage of anecdotes,” she laughs.

Hannah tells me her and her family are very clear with each other about what they think – “we work together, we have to be” – so writing her novel also meant preparing for her greatest and closest critics.

Luckily she needn’t have worried, with Hannah telling me she thinks her novel is the first one her father has read since university – “now that was the real gold star”.