As baffling as she is beautiful, such is the allure of Kate Bush that last year the author John Mendelssohn even wrote a novel, Waiting For Kate Bush, about a devoted fan’s suicidal despair at his heroine’s failure to produce a new album.

Well, the 12-year wait for that album is almost over. Aerial is to be released in November and a single is coming later this month. One of Britain’s most successful and surprising female singers is back.

A doctor’s daughter from Bexleyheath, Bush was just 19 in 1978 when she burst upon a music world dominated by punk with her album The Kick Inside. This featured the hit singles The Man With The Child In His Eyes, which she wrote when she was 13, and Wuthering Heights, the first self-composed No 1 hit by a British woman. She later confessed that she had never read Emily Brontë’s novel, but the song, with its vocal leaps and screeches, was an extraordinary new sound.

The spell that this ethereal sorceress cast over the male of the species was equally remarkable. With her wild hair and strange stage movements, she appeared to have drifted into this world from another plane. She was an object of desire but also a bit spooky.

Bush’s first tour in 1979 was her last. She hated the pressure of performing live and publicising her records and spent the 1980s and early 1990s in the studio, where she was known as a perfectionist, producing nine albums and 13 hit singles. Many female artists who came in her wake, including Madonna, Björk and kd lang, have cited her as an inspiration.

Britain’s second wealthiest female singer after Annie Lennox, Bush is worth an estimated £25 million. But since her last album in 1993, The Red Shoes, she has rarely been spotted, earning comparisons to Miss Havisham. Now 47, she lives on an island in the Thames in Berkshire with her seven-year-old son, Bertie, by the guitarist Danny MacIntosh. “I’m a quiet, private person who has managed to hang around for a few years,” she says.