What sort of person writes fiction about the past? It is helpful to be acquainted with violence, because the past is violent. It is necessary to know that the people who live there are not the same as people now. It is necessary to understand that the dead are real, and have power over the living. It is helpful to have encountered the dead firsthand, in the form of ghosts.
The writer’s relationship with a historical character is in some ways less intimate than with a fictional one: the historical character is elusive and far away, so there is more distance between them. But there is also more equality between them, and more longing; when he dies, real mourning is possible.
Historical fiction is a hybrid form, halfway between fiction and nonfiction. It is pioneer country, without fixed laws. To some, if it is fiction, anything is permitted. To others, wanton invention when facts are to be found, or, worse, contradiction of well-known facts, is a horror: a violation of an implicit contract with the reader, and a betrayal of the people written about. Ironically, it is when those stricter standards of truth are applied that historical fiction looks most like lying.
It is, in some ways, a humble form. There are limits to the writer’s authority. She cannot know her character completely. She has no power to alter his world or postpone his death. But in other ways it is not humble at all: she presumes to know the secrets of the dead and the mechanics of history.
The reputation of historical fiction is unstable. In the thirties, the Marxist literary critic György Lukács argued that early historical novels like those by Scott, Balzac, and Tolstoy showed that man’s nature was not fixed but transformed over time; thus, they showed that revolution was possible and, in doing so, made it more likely. But these days the historical novel is not quite respectable. It has difficulty distinguishing itself from its easy sister the historical romance. It is thought to involve irritating ways of talking, or excessive descriptions of clothes.
The past, in fiction, has more prestige than the future, but, as with the future, its prestige declines with its distance from the present. Novels about the past hundred years or so are all right, but once you go beyond the First World War, once you leave indoor plumbing and move into crinolines and wigs, your genre status deteriorates very quickly. A book jacket depicting Henry VIII, or a queen wearing pearls, is off-putting to a certain sort of reader. Why would a writer write about the distant past, that reader might wonder, if not to escape the realist discipline imposed by familiarity? If not to flee to a world blurry enough so that men can behave like Vikings and not seem ridiculous, and ladies can be ladies without being pathetic? And if a writer writes about historically significant people then she is forced into a respectful posture that depreciates her status still further, since it has become one of the hallmarks of literary fiction that its authors regard their characters with something between affectionate condescension and total contempt.
These, then, are some of the obstacles that the serious novelist must consider in deciding to leave the safe precincts of the present and venture into the past.
The first novel that Hilary Mantel wrote was about the French Revolution. It did not start out as a novel, exactly, nor did she start out as a novelist. It was 1975, and she was twenty-three, living in Manchester and selling dresses in a department store. She had realized that she didn’t have the money to finish her legal training, and, after a year working in a geriatric hospital, that she didn’t want to be a social worker. She was bored with selling dresses; she had started taking books about the French Revolution out of the library, one after another. Then she began taking notes. After she had been doing this for some time, she asked herself, What am I doing? And the answer came: I am writing a book.
She had had no notion of writing fiction. She had considered reading history at university, but she saw that girls who did arts subjects ended up as teachers, and although she knew the world needed teachers, there was a depressing circularity to the business, clever girls becoming teachers to produce more clever girls to become teachers. People said, Oh, teaching, it’s something to fall back on, which meant, When your husband leaves you you can support yourself. It wasn’t enticing. Because she wasn’t professionally trained as a historian, she thought that if she were to write a historical book it would have to be fiction. But she didn’t know how to make things up, she didn’t know when to make things up, and it seemed to her extremely unfortunate that she had to make things up at all.
She found that quite a bit was known about the revolutionaries. They had died young, but their wives and sisters had lived, and saved letters and kept diaries. So it was only here and there, at first, that she was compelled to invent things, filling in gaps. She might read about a conversation and deduce what other conversations must have preceded it. She might read about a separation and infer the quarrel. Whenever she could, she quoted directly from the record.
But while with facts she was cautious, with form she was experimental. She tried everything. She read a lot of plays, and she loved Brecht, so she thought maybe she could write a Brechtian novel. She liked writing dialogue, it turned out, and much of the novel came out in that form.
In some places, the prose disappeared altogether, and she wrote in the form of a play. She didn’t want to write an actual play, because plays involved other people, and she wanted full control. She employed multiple narrators, though not every major character got a chance to narrate: Robespierre did not, while the two others, Danton and Desmoulins, did. Later, she would have considered that imbalance a flaw, but at the time she was trying a bit of this and a bit of that and not worrying too much how it all fit together.
She had no interest in royalty or in aristocrats—it was the revolutionaries she cared about. She cared about them because of their political achievement, but also because they were young, as she was, and had been driven from the provinces to the capital, as she had, by extreme ambition. Camille Desmoulins—rash, witty, louche—was the easiest character for her to imagine because he was a writer.
Desmoulins had gone to school with Robespierre, and befriended Danton when they were both young lawyers in Paris. Danton was ugly, brutal, and charismatic.
Robespierre was morally rigid, physically weak, emotionally cold, and almost celibate. He cared about no one but Desmoulins.
Because of his unappealing puritanism and his role in the Terror, Robespierre was commonly reviled. But, in the course of writing the book, she found that she liked Danton less and Robespierre more. She wanted to persuade the reader to feel as she did, but she knew she had written a scene that would seal the reader’s dislike, right at the beginning: Robespierre’s father leaned over his son with alcohol on his breath, and the child jerked back “with an adult expression of distaste.” She tried to take the scene out, but she found that she couldn’t, because she had seen it in her mind’s eye and felt that it was true. She wrote little about ideas. For her, the politics of the revolution had to do with tactics and personal power: the lordly dominance of Mirabeau; Danton’s cynical pragmatism; Robespierre’s incorruptibility and uncanny political insight; the remorseless cruelty of Marat.
She knew, of course, that all her major characters would die young. She had been working toward this from the beginning; she called her book “A Place of Greater Safety”—that place was the grave. But they were her first characters, and they were very dear to her. Writing the guillotine scenes was hard. Afterward, she grieved.
The novel didn’t sell. She finished it in 1979 and started sending it around to publishers and agents, but nobody was interested. “I wrote a letter to an agent saying would you look at my book, it’s about the French Revolution, it’s not a historical romance, and the letter came back saying, we do not take historical romances,” she says. “They literally could not read my letter, because of the expectations surrounding the words ‘French Revolution’—that it was bound to be about ladies with high hair.” It was not, in general, a good time for historical fiction. A few years earlier, Gore Vidal had published a novel about Aaron Burr, and E. L. Doctorow had published “Ragtime,” about the years before the First World War; Thomas Pynchon and Barry Unsworth had written historical novels. But it had been forty years since Robert Graves’s wildly successful “I, Claudius,” and there wasn’t much else out there of a serious literary bent.
At this point, everything in her life had fallen apart. Her young marriage was ending, she was very sick and in pain much of the time, and her book had been rejected. Of these three things, there was only one that she had any real control over. She decided that if she was going to make a career as a novelist she had better try something completely different. Her eight-hundred-page historical novel had failed; well, she would write a two-hundred-page modern novel instead, and if that also failed she would reconsider whether this was what she was supposed to be doing.
The novel that emerged out of this desolate time in her life, “Every Day Is Mother’s Day,” was a bleak, airless story of awful people trapped in miserable lives: a deranged mother; a mute, malignant daughter; a coarse wife; a depressed failure of a husband. She punished her characters without mercy—tortured them with hostile spectres, child molestation, mold, filth, boredom, angst, canned food, social workers.
She had set out to write a book different from her first, and it could hardly have been more so. “A Place of Greater Safety” involved herculean characters altering the course of history: young, fierce, brutal, and witty—everything was big, everything was important, the most trivial action took on heroic significance. In “Every Day Is Mother’s Day,” everything was small, decayed, repellent, cramped, and pointless. The book was bought at once, and published to glowing reviews.
It turned out that she had a knack for writing books so different that they could have been written by different people. She decided to follow “Every Day” with a sequel, “Vacant Possession,” but the sequel, although it involved most of the same major characters, was in some ways nearly as different from the earlier book as that had been from her first. The deranged mother was dead, and the coarse wife had lost weight and changed her hair, which accounted for some of the relief, but the main difference was that the mute, malignant daughter had transformed from a passive, inscrutable menace into a verbal and purposeful one. Thus, while the misery remained, it was no longer trapped. Air rushed in. Description was replaced by dialogue, suicidal thoughts by homicidal ones. Propelled by the evil daughter’s malevolent designs and a series of eye-popping coincidences, the story ricocheted about like a satanic farce.
The marriage that ended and the sickness that ended it had both begun years before. She had met Gerald McEwen, who became her husband, when they were sixteen. They hung around in the same circle of Catholic kids in Manchester. They were both of Irish extraction, but his family was half a generation further advanced than hers: his father had left school at fourteen, like her mother, but, instead of going to work in a mill, as her mother had, he became an accountant.
She was a tiny, thin, pale girl with long pale hair and large pale eyes. Her teeth jutted to a point in the middle of her mouth, as though her jaw were triangular. Her nose was a curved beak. “Out of this timorous-looking person came this really loud voice,” Gerald says. “It was a shock.” They started having drinks in pubs, talking about politics. It soon became clear that they would be spending their lives together, and they talked about what those lives would be like. She would be a barrister, and he would join the family firm as an accountant. They would live nearby. They married when they were twenty. But then, while he was in university, his father suddenly died and the family firm had to be sold, so he dropped the idea of being an accountant. She went to the London School of Economics to read law, but then she discovered that training as a barrister required money that she didn’t have. He trained as a geologist, and started teaching in Manchester, in his old school. She worked in a shop and started reading about the French Revolution. They were poor, they would always be poor, and when they saw the miserable, bored, beaten-down teachers who were Gerald’s colleagues they knew they didn’t want that life.
They decided to go abroad, and he applied for a job in Botswana. “It was a freezing night, because you were wearing that huge blue jacket of yours,” she says. “When we saw the letter lying on the mat, it was a fat letter, so we knew it wasn’t a rejection, and I felt just flooded by the promise of sunshine. I remember saying, But I’ll never finish my book. And I shed two tears—but that was all. I didn’t know what would be out there for me, and I had no idea what it would be like, but I thought, I will never be cold again.”
Botswana in the late nineteen-seventies was barely developed. “There was no tourism,” she says. “The airport was a tiny little airport with its sole amenity one white cast-iron table with two chairs, one of which wobbled. This country is the size of France, and you had, what, forty miles of tarred road? And there were no newspapers, no TV, no life except what you made.” Gerald worked with a group of geologists who were mapping the country properly for the first time. She worked on her novel. But she was sick, and getting worse.
Back in England, when she was still at university, she had started feeling pains in her legs. She began vomiting, often. Then she had terrible pain in her middle. She went to see a doctor, and because she was so thin he tested her for anemia, but she wasn’t anemic, so he decided the pain must be psychological. He prescribed antidepressants. She was indeed depressed, since she wasn’t speaking to her family at the time, so she took them. When those didn’t work, he sent her to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist told her that her problem was stress brought on by an excess of ambition, unnatural in a woman. He gave her tranquillizers, but their only effect was to stoke her rage: she had fantasies of arson and killing people with knives. She kept these secret from him. The psychiatrist told her he didn’t want her writing anymore; it was bad for her. He sent her to stay in the university clinic and prescribed antipsychotics, which, as she wrote in a memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost,” pitched her into a hellish state:
She went off the drugs and functioned again, but her pain was no better. For years, she simply put up with it, until at last, in desperation, she went to the university library in Botswana, determined to make a diagnosis herself. She deduced that she had endometriosis, a disorder in which uterine cells are found in other parts of the body; the cells bleed each month and scar tissue builds up, and when that scar tissue presses against nerves it causes pain. Her pain was growing unbearable, but she had finally come to the end of her book, and she was determined to type out a fair copy to show to publishers and agents when she went back to England for Christmas. She spent weeks typing, finished, and collapsed.
In England, she saw various doctors. “I went into St. George’s Hospital,” she says, “and ten days later I came out minus ovaries, womb, bits of bowel, bits of bladder. Minus a future, as far as having children was concerned.” It wasn’t that she felt such a strong urge to have children—she had been married for seven years and hadn’t tried to get pregnant. She was good for more than breeding, she thought. But she’d always assumed that she’d have the chance to change her mind.
While she was absorbing the idea that she was sterile, she and her husband divorced.
She moved around England, staying with her mother, or with people she didn’t really know. She was homesick for Botswana and for Gerald, she was popping barbiturates day and night to deal with both sorts of pain, and she was growing thinner. She got a day job in a bookshop and a night job in a bar, and thought about the books she might write in the future. Then, about two years later, Gerald came back to England, changed. He had been for a job interview in Jeddah, and it had frightened him. He felt confused and jittery. The old Gerald, she thought, would not have expressed such things. She had also changed. They decided to get back together. He got the job he had interviewed for, and though neither of them particularly wanted to live in Saudi Arabia, they decided that it would be an experience. They had to be married if she was to go there with him, so they married again, and in 1982 prepared to leave for Jeddah.
The thing that had not changed was her health. She was in pain again, nearly all the time. Doctors told her that she could not still have endometriosis. At last, one doctor disagreed, and prescribed hormones, which helped, but the effect of these was to make her gain weight. Not a little weight—astonishing amounts of weight. She had started out around a hundred pounds; within nine months she was more than a hundred and fifty, and she kept on growing rapidly from there. She grew through so many dress sizes so quickly that she could hardly keep herself in clothes. At first, she didn’t mind being a bit fatter—she had always been very thin, and was sick of getting dirty looks from other women—but soon her body came to seem entirely alien to her, a weird excrescence. Girls in dress shops stared at her with contempt. People started treating her differently: when she was thin, they thought she was fierce and nervous; now that she was fat, they perceived her as placid and maternal, although those were the last things she was.
The only good thing about Saudi Arabia was that it gave her the material for a fourth novel, “Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.” The bafflement and fright that Gerald had felt in his first few days there she felt, too, and that sense only grew worse. They lived in an unappealing company flat, which she rarely left. Being a woman, she was forbidden to drive, and there was nowhere close enough to walk to. She couldn’t even go for a walk around the block, since if she appeared on the street alone men shouted lewd propositions at her or tried to run her over. She attempted to conform her clothing to the requirements of local decency, but there was always something wrong—some rule she had broken that nobody had told her of, some violation so subtle she could not detect it. Beyond these inconveniences, the kingdom was pervaded by an air of secrecy and violence. Crimes were not reported unless someone had been punished; people were jailed for infractions they weren’t aware of committing; others had accidents and disappeared. When she and Gerald moved in, they were told that the flat upstairs from theirs was not lived in, but that they should never inquire what it was used for.
It occurred to her that she was living in a gothic novel. “All the markers were there,” she says. “The woman travels to a strange place, her life is constrained there, and it’s controlled by a man who seems to change his nature from the situation in which she first met him. There is the moment when she fears she is going mad. And then she has to realize no, I am not going mad, it is the external world that really is persecuting me.” She was keeping a diary and realized that she was almost writing the book already—she just needed to find the core of it. One day, she climbed up onto the roof of her building, because it was the only place she could go outside to get some air. “I was craning down for some reason, and on my neighbor’s balcony I saw a big crate, and something went click. I thought to myself, You could get a person in that crate. And then I suddenly knew what kind of novel it was.”
They returned to England in 1986. They had lived abroad for nine years. It was time to go home. “The received wisdom was, either you come back after ten years or you don’t come back, because you never fit,” she says. “It’s hard to come back to little England and the incessant rain.”
When she was a child, she lived in a village in the northern part of Derbyshire—not a pretty English village but a bleak, dank, cold Northern village on the edge of the moors, its people “distrustful and life-refusing,” she wrote in her memoir, working in the cotton mills from late childhood, living in cramped houses without bathrooms or hot water, barely educated in harsh schools.
From when she was about eight to when she was eleven, she lived with her two brothers, her mother, her father, and her mother’s lover, Jack. It was hard to say when Jack had moved in; he’d been coming over for tea more often until one afternoon he didn’t leave. He moved into her mother’s bedroom, and her father moved to a room down the hall. This arrangement had a number of consequences. Her family was talked about, and children at school asked her who slept in which bed. Her mother’s parents, to whom she had been very close, no longer spoke to their daughter. It was not possible for her mother to go to the shops. At first, she’d had only one brother, and then a second brother was born. After she was old enough to understand where babies came from, she assumed that this second brother must be Jack’s child, and perhaps Jack and her mother did as well, but when he was grown he turned out to look so much like her father that it was clear he was not. Her mother, then, was sleeping with both men.
During this time, she discovered that her house was haunted. It wasn’t only she who felt it—she overheard adults talking about the ghosts as well. She realized that they were as frightened as she was, and were helpless to protect her. She already understood that the world was denser and more crowded than her senses could perceive: there were ghosts, but even those dead who were not ghosts still existed; she was used to hearing talk in which family members alive and dead were discussed without distinction. The dead seemed to her only barely dead.
Until she was twelve or so, she was deeply religious. “When you’re inculcated with religion at such an early age, or when you’re receptive to it, as I was, you become preoccupied with the unseen reality,” she says. “This other world, the next world, to me in my childhood seemed just as real as the world I was living in. It wasn’t that I had a mental picture of it—it was that I never questioned its existence. I used to conduct a lot of imaginary conversations with God. I don’t think Jesus was any less real to me than my aunts and uncles; the fact that I happened not to be able to see him was pretty irrelevant to me.”
She felt, as a child, in a permanent state of sin. There was something terribly wrong about her, for which she was to blame, but which she had only limited ability to change. Catholic guilt continued to grip her even after she stopped believing in God. Her family’s misery was encompassing and bewildering, and was it not likely that she was responsible for making her parents so unhappy? Might they not, without her, have a chance at a better life? But these suspicions were not so powerful as the effect of a thing that happened to her one day that she cannot explain.
She was seven or eight, and she was playing in the garden behind her house. She looked up. There was something there, in the coarse grass beyond the gate.
In her memoir, she says that she cannot write about this—technically, her prose isn’t up to it.
She couldn’t see it, but she knew that it was evil. She understood, too, that it had contaminated her.
She had sinned: she had seen what no human was meant to see. She hadn’t just seen—she had looked. And therefore she was complicit with the thing, and it was now inside her.
This encounter shadowed her for years. “It soured my view of the universe, and I felt on much more precarious ground. Until then, I thought the unseen reality was my friend, and after that I didn’t think that anymore,” she says. “I felt that God had done nothing for me in that moment. He might not be as strong as I’d imagined, and forces of evil seemed to be romping about unchecked.”
It turned out that the first part of her childhood was the easy part. When she was eleven, a moving van came, and she and her brothers, her mother, and Jack moved out. She never saw her father again. They moved a few miles away, to a lower-middle-class town in Cheshire, a step up. In this new place, the houses had rosebushes and bay windows and indoor bathrooms; the people who lived in them were office workers in Manchester. They spoke differently and their faces looked different. She went to a new school, where she had a good history teacher.
There were no ghosts in their Cheshire house, but the old unease was replaced by a new kind that was worse: her mother and Jack were pretending to be married, but they hadn’t moved far enough away to keep their secret; there were people around who knew them from before. She was given a new surname, Jack’s, but, unlike her brothers, who were too young to remember their old life, she did remember. Jack had a terrible temper. He would scream at her; she became very still, a small, frozen creature who knew his secret. Her mother was a more satisfactory antagonist: her mother and he fought so constantly, and with such vigor, that it seemed to her that they must enjoy it. Later, in her teens, she began writing down everything they said. She realized that, awful though their battles were, they were also quite funny, because they never changed. It came to the point where she, listening, could say, And now she’s going to say this, and he’s going to say that, and she’d be right.
It was not until shortly before his death that she and Jack spoke to each other without suspicion. After he died, his ghost visited her, but its presence was unobtrusive.
In the early two-thousands, she started work on a novel, “Beyond Black,” about a fat professional medium named Alison, whose savage childhood has left her vulnerable to invasive spirits—notably Morris, the ghost of a lowlife john of her mother’s. Disliking the administrative side of her work, Alison hires an assistant, Colette—thin, bitter, and looking for a change.
But in the end Colette leaves, because living with ghosts is something you’d never do if you had a choice.
When she wakes in the morning, she likes to start writing right away, before she speaks, because whatever remnants sleep has left are the gift her brain has given her for the day. Her dream life is important to the balance of her mind: it’s the place where she experiences disorder. Her dreams are archetypal, mythological, enormous, full of pageantry—there are knights and monsters. She has been to the crusades in her dreams more than once.
When she’s starting a new book, she needs to feel her way inside the characters, to know what it’s like to be them. There is a trick she uses sometimes, which another writer taught her. Sit quietly and withdraw your attention from the room you’re in until you’re focussed inside your mind. Imagine a chair and invite your character to come and sit in it; once he is comfortable, you may ask him questions. She tried this for the first time when she was writing “The Giant, O’Brien”: the giant came in, but, before sitting down in the chair, he bent down and tested it, to see if it would take his weight. On that occasion, she never got any further, because she was so excited that she punched the air and shouted “Yes!” But from then on she could imagine herself in the giant’s body.
So much of fiction is a matter of trying to force uncertainty and freedom into a process that is in fact entirely determined by choice or events. When she is writing historical fiction, she knows what will happen and can do nothing about it, but she must try to imagine the events as if the outcome were not yet fixed, from the perspective of the characters, who are moving forward in ignorance. This is not just an emotional business of entering the characters’ point of view; it is also a matter of remembering that at every point things could have been different. What she, the author, knows is history, not fate.
When she is writing ordinary fiction, she has complete power over what happens, but she must feel that her characters have free will or else the dead hand of determinism will crush the book. She must feel that her control of them is partial—so light that it is barely sensed. Sometimes one of her characters will say something and it seems to her that she has no idea what is going to be said back until suddenly she does, because there it is, on the page. When this happens, she knows the process is working.
She finds this lightness, this relinquishing of control, difficult to achieve, especially since it cannot be accomplished by simple effort. Her mind does not naturally float about without direction: it is a machine designed for analytic thought. “I like my world, and particularly my inner world, to be organized,” she says. “I like filing systems. But the whole process of writing novels is the opposite of that—it’s do not label, do not define, do not decide, leave everything loose. You have to say to yourself, I take my hands off, I let my unconscious work for me. It’s desperately uncomfortable! There’s one whole side of my nature that makes me the least likely novelist in the world: the person who insists on getting the historical facts all lined up, and who feels that there’s immense security in a good card index.”
She is a woman whose first professional impulse was to be a barrister, and whose second was to be a social worker. She is the kind of logical, forceful person who is good at sorting out other people’s foolishness and practical difficulties. But fiction is about creating foolishness and practical difficulties and allowing them to tangle and fester until they are beyond repair. “The only Shakespeare play I hadn’t read, for many years, was ‘Othello,’ ” she says. “I could not read it. I kept wanting to get hold of it and straighten it out about the handkerchief. But, finally, I made myself read it. I forced myself past the point of extreme discomfort.”
Difficult as it is for her to be loose, it is even more difficult for her to be lazy; but that, too, is something she has had to learn to become, because the best ideas come to her when her mind is idle. When she was a child going to confession for the first time, she felt she hadn’t any sins worth the trouble, and so she invented one: she said to the priest, “Father, I have been lazy.” But as time went on she began to believe in her invention, and became terrified of any sign of slackening of effort. Some days, she acts busy to convince herself, even though it is the days when she makes not a single mark on the paper which yield weeks and weeks of work. It is very hard to cede control. “I don’t think one ever quite learns to trust the process,” she says. “I feel, What if I wake up tomorrow and I can’t do it anymore? I know I’ll always be able to write, in the sense of having a robust style that’s sufficient to the occasion, and I know that books can be got onto the page by craft, but the thing that makes a phrase that fizzes on the paper—you always fear that may not be there any longer, because, after all, you did nothing to deserve it. You did nothing to contrive it. It’s just there. You don’t understand it, it’s out of your control, and it could desert you.”
Occasionally, the problem is not too much control but too little: she will become so intensely involved in writing a scene that the only way out of it is to shut down consciousness altogether by going to sleep. The curtain must be drawn between acts. This is especially true if she’s writing about the past: she cannot simply put down her pen and reënter the present; there must be an intermission when the stage goes dark. This is how she remembers who she is and where she is.
In the last months of writing a book, as the end comes in sight, she becomes possessed. She doesn’t go anywhere, or talk about anything other than the book. She stops only to eat. Her sleep and work hours become erratic: often she will wake up at three in the morning, write for several hours, and then go back to bed. She becomes more and more anxious: it feels to her like stage fright, unnaturally and intolerably prolonged, as though at last she were spinning all her plates at once, darting about from one to the other and terrified of making a mistake because she knows that if one plate spins off balance they will all come crashing down.
The contract that she signed for “Wolf Hall” was a contract for two books, the first of which, “The Complete Stranger,” was to be set in Africa in the seventies and eighties. Usually, she begins a book in a tentative fashion, feeling her way in, testing the ground, but this time it was as though she’d been thrown into the lowest, darkest part of it right away. The writing was harrowing, and at night she had terrible dreams. She saw herself walking around her old house in Botswana: her memory had always been so powerful that the past was as vivid to her as the present. In the book, she wasn’t writing about her own life, but imagining herself into that time and that place was enough to bring it all back: the worst months of her marriage; her pain, her illness and the terrible uncertainty about what it was; a close friend’s suicide. The feelings were so disturbing that she decided to stop writing the book altogether and try her hand at “Wolf Hall” instead.
She had been thinking for a long time of writing a book about Thomas Cromwell—an adviser to Henry VIII, and for nearly a decade one of the most powerful men in Britain—but she had thought of herself as an eighteenth-century person. She had written about the French Revolution, and “The Giant, O’Brien,” also set in the eighteenth century, and she saw the world through eighteenth-century eyes. She thought perhaps that she didn’t have the energy to start over with a new period. But the idea didn’t go away; and she knew that the five-hundredth anniversary of Henry VIII’s coronation was coming up, in 2009, and that would be a very big deal in England. It would be difficult to sell a book about Henry after that, when everyone was sick of him. It was now or never.
She began to write “Wolf Hall”—and, all at once, she was happy. From the first moments, she was convinced that this was what she was meant to be doing, that everything in her life had brought her to this. She never showed her writing to anyone before it was virtually finished, but when she wrote the first page of “Wolf Hall” she wanted to show it to someone right away. “I was almost laughing to myself,” she says. “I know the subject matter’s dire, but I was filled with glee and a sense of power, a sense that I knew how to do this. It began to unscroll before me like a film; it was in the present tense because I didn’t know what would happen next minute. It was as if after swimming and swimming you’ve suddenly found your feet are on ground that’s firm. I knew from the first paragraph that this was going to be the best thing I’d ever done.”
Before she began to write, she spent a long time learning about Cromwell and reading deeply in the period. She had always been intrigued by Cromwell’s villainous reputation. Among both his contemporaries and historians, he was widely thought of as practically a sixteenth-century Himmler, and previous literary depictions—Robert Bolt’s 1960 play “A Man for All Seasons,” Ford Madox Ford’s “The Fifth Queen”—had taken this view. Even his own biographer hated him. But, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, Geoffrey Elton, a historian at Cambridge, had argued that Cromwell was a farseeing modern statesman who had transformed the English government from a personal fiefdom of the king to a bureaucratic parliamentary structure that could survive royal incompetence and enact reforms through legislation rather than through fiat. In so doing, he helped to bring about the English Reformation without the kind of bloodshed or descent into absolutism that took place in much of the rest of Europe. By the time she began to read about Cromwell, academic fashion had moved on and a new generation hated him again, but she found Elton’s arguments persuasive.
Like Robespierre, Cromwell could be brutal, but he promoted many of the right sorts of social reforms, and she could forgive him a lot for that. She was no longer an ardent socialist, as she’d been in university—she wasn’t offended by pragmatism, and she appreciated a man who knew how to get things done. Certainly she was never going to sentimentalize, as Robert Bolt did, Cromwell’s enemy, the saintly Thomas More, who died for his conscience and made sure that other people died for his conscience, too.
She couldn’t have written about the French Revolution now, she realized—she was too old, she had lost too much hope, she could no longer feel what those young men had felt. This was a book of middle age: her Cromwell was in his forties, he had travelled all over Europe, fought in wars, worked in banking, trained in the law, and finally, back in England, had become a businessman and an aide to Cardinal Wolsey. He could train a falcon and fix a jury, was said to know the New Testament by heart, and could persuade a king that his ideas were the king’s own. He acquired a reputation for getting his way.
He came from the street, he was the son of a violent, alcoholic blacksmith from Putney, he looked like a murderer, and he frightened people. Nobody knew exactly what he’d done in his years abroad, and that blank period, that gap, was powerful.
She decided to leave the blank period blank and skip from the moment Cromwell left England as a child to the time, twenty-seven years later, when he had established himself in London. Only rarely did she make something up out of nothing—almost always there was some hint in the sources to suggest it. Even many of her tiny, novelistic details came from the archives—often from the gossipy letters sent by ambassadors to their home courts. There was a scene in the sequel to “Wolf Hall,” “Bring Up the Bodies,” for instance, in which a messenger gave Jane Seymour a love letter and a bag of money that Henry had sent her, although he was still married to Anne Boleyn; Jane gave back the money, then took the letter and kissed it, but gave it back unopened. That came straight from an ambassador’s correspondence.
She couldn’t always be sure that a character was in the place she said he was in at the time she put him there, but she spent endless hours making sure that he wasn’t definitely somewhere else. “Once you play around with history, it trips a whole load of consequences,” she says. “You know the TV drama ‘The Tudors’? Well, they decided that it was a bit too complicated if Henry had two sisters, so they rolled them up into one. But then that sister had to marry somebody, and now they’re in trouble, because really his younger sister married the old King of France, but at a previous stage they decided that the old King of France was boring, so they had brought in Francis I early. But then, oops, she can’t marry Francis I, so we have to invent a king for her to marry! So it gets more and more ridiculous.” She says, “I cannot describe to you what revulsion it inspires in me when people play around with the facts. If I were to distort something just to make it more convenient or dramatic, I would feel I’d failed as a writer. If you understand what you’re talking about, you should be drawing the drama out of real life, not putting it there, like icing on a cake.”
One of the things she’d always found attractive about the Henry story was that there was so much in it about women. No wives, no story. One of Cromwell’s advantages at court was that he did not underestimate women—neither their usefulness as informants nor their cunning as enemies.
This was always a problem with historical fiction, if you liked to stick closely to the record: there was very little information about women, on the whole, but if you wrote a novel without them it seemed off-kilter. In her first draft of “A Place of Greater Safety,” she had written mostly about the men, but, years later, when a publisher came to hear of its existence and wanted to publish it, she built the women up. The absence of facts didn’t seem as large a problem as it had before: now that she was a real novelist, she was used to putting thoughts into people’s heads. But she stuck with what was plausible—she couldn’t stand maudlin feminist mythmaking. “There was a time when, truffling around historical fiction for women, I seemed to come across nothing but ordinary women who happened to have a brilliant knowledge of herbs,” she says. “Or the fascination with the figure of the witch.”
She doesn’t believe in inventing greatness or significance where none exists. This is why she likes historical fiction: she feels she can write about greatness only in historical moments that have already proved ripe for its flourishing. She believes that there are no great characters without a great time; ordinary times breed ordinary people (of the sort—dull, trapped, despairing—who inhabit modern novels). If Robespierre had lived out his life in Arras, she thinks, he would have ended up like one of her characters in “Every Day Is Mother’s Day”: not enough money, stuck in a bad marriage, frustrated at work, and crushed by self-contempt.
“Wolf Hall” is about politics, but it is also a song of England. Before she started it, she didn’t feel like an English writer; England, to her, was the southern part of the country—the Protestant, green and pleasant part. Whatever England was, she didn’t know it; it wasn’t hers. But then something shifted, something loosened, and she took a great stride away from her past and planted her flag right in the center of Englishness—because nothing, she thought, could be more seminal to English identity than the reign of Henry VIII and the coming of the English Bible. Thomas Cromwell had showed the English how to know themselves: in 1538, he ordered parishes to keep records of baptisms, marriages, and burials. And now she, writing about Cromwell, would furnish another document of English self-knowledge. It would be political but also mythological, since Englishness contained equal parts of both.
The mythological voice is one that, like the heroic voice, she feels free to use only when she is writing about the past. “The Giant, O’Brien,” which she wrote before she felt English, is almost wholly in this voice—it is a song of Ireland. Until she wrote “Wolf Hall,” she loved this book the best. Before she started to write it, she had something altogether different in mind—a big, thumping, realist historical novel, packed with research, focussed on John Hunter, a famous eighteenth-century surgeon. The giant, based on an enormous Irishman about whom almost nothing was known, would be a minor character. But, when she started to write, it turned into a fairy tale. Often, she sees her books, cinematically, but this one was entirely heard, in voices, and as she wrote it felt like singing.
It was a lament: that was the kind of song it was. When she was a small child, she had great-aunts and great-uncles who remembered Ireland, but by the time she was ten they were dead and her consciousness of being Irish drained away. Then, in mid-life, she started thinking about it again, wondering about the lost language, and lost people: how, when her great-grandmother’s brothers went to America, they were never heard from again, because nobody could write, and nobody could read their letter anyway, if it came; and how in Ireland there had been no Thomas Cromwell to mandate parish records, so who could say if they had even existed? She was aware that there was a certain ripeness about Celtic nostalgia, but she felt it just the same—a sense of grief.
A year ago, she and Gerald settled in a very English place—Budleigh Salterton, a little village on the coast of Devon that she first visited when she was sixteen. It seemed to her then a kind of paradise—it was the first time she had walked through a meadow knee-high in wildflowers—and she resolved to live there one day. The village descends steep cliffs and continues by a pebble beach, along which stands a row of colorfully painted wooden bathing huts; it has white cottages with thatched roofs and rampant English flower gardens, and a high street with little shops that sell cups of tea and antique lace and West Country cream. Nothing much happens in the village, which is how she likes it. Of its population of five thousand, a large percentage are over the age of seventy, so it is a good place to grow old. She does not intend to move again.
She and Gerald live in a flat in a building that used to be a hotel, and she can see the sea from her window. On her walls there are reproductions of paintings of Thomas Cromwell, Camille Desmoulins, and Shakespeare. On her bookshelves, in addition to books about the Tudors and the French Revolution, there are a few objects—a pair of china dogs, a glass owl. On the window seat in the living room are a large stuffed lion, a stuffed lamb, and a stuffed dog. There is an old-fashioned many-drawered desk in the living room, but she works at a modern desk in the hallway that the elevator opens onto, surrounded by file cabinets.
They had always meant to live here eventually, but Budleigh is three hours from London, and until now they felt that they had to be closer in. Gerald travelled constantly for work, and she felt that making her career as an author involved obliging people and showing your face, so she did that as long as she thought she needed to, sitting on committees, judging prizes, giving readings, attending events. She went to hundreds of film screenings—she was The Spectator’s film critic for four years—and wrote hundreds of book reviews.
She taught writing workshops, sometimes with a novelist friend with whom, afterward, she would drink gin and read certain students’ work and roll around on the floor laughing.
She didn’t mind being in front of an audience, but she found small talk a strain. She never lived in literary London proper—there were too many authors there, she thought, distracting themselves, participating in activities that felt like writing but weren’t, such as talking about writing with each other. But in 2008 Gerald got very sick with diverticulitis and had to give up his career, and after she won the Man Booker Prize, for “Wolf Hall,” she felt that she could dictate her own terms. She had discharged her public duties as an author; if people wanted to see her now, they could come to her.
These days, Gerald works as her manager. Before “Wolf Hall,” she’d had good sales for a literary novelist, but never the sales or recognition of other novelists of her generation—McEwan, Amis, Rushdie. This may be because of the marginal status of historical fiction, or because her books are so startlingly different from one another. “If I had been more career-minded, I probably should have secured myself a public and written for it, by repeating what I do,” she says. “But I’ve just not found that possible or desirable. The odd thing is, writers who do that, why don’t they bore themselves, I wonder?” With the Booker, the flood of correspondence and solicitations suddenly became overwhelming, so Gerald stepped in.
She is much calmer now than she used to be. She never thought that she’d end up so calm. On the other hand, she never thought that she’d end up so fat, either, and, who knows, maybe she’s calm because people expect her to be, a woman of her shape. (Even now, she sometimes has a powerful feeling that she’s not in the right body.) She is calm, but that does not mean that she is any less ambitious. She deeply believes that a writer is only as good as her next paragraph. And making money is very important to her, coming from where she comes from. To her, one of the most significant markers of success in the world is to be able to open the household bills and know that she can pay them.
She isn’t calm because she has reconciled herself to her medical fate: she has not. “I wasn’t certain, and I’m still not certain, whether I wanted children,” she says. “What I wanted was the choice. I have felt most sorrow in later life, over the last ten years, when grandchildren are being born, I suppose because I was very close to my own grandmother. Of course, it follows that if you’re not a mother you’re not going to be a grandmother, but that’s not something you think of in your thirties. So the loss keeps changing its shape.”
A hundred years ago in Danzig there lived a young woman named Stanisława Przybyszewska, who was gripped by such a passion for Robespierre that she died of it. She set out to write the best of all plays about the French Revolution and cared for nothing else. She lived alone in an unheated room and barely ate. She dated her letters by the Revolutionary calendar. She produced a play that was performed twice, savagely edited to a running length of five hours. She died of malnutrition and morphine addiction at thirty-three.
Hilary Mantel has never written a book of nonfiction, other than her memoir, but when she finishes the third volume of her Cromwell trilogy she plans to write a book about Przybyszewska, which she will call “The Woman Who Died of Robespierre.” She wants to sit and think in a sustained way about what it is that she or anyone else is doing when she writes historical fiction. What sort of person writes fiction about the past? It is helpful to be acquainted with violence, because the past is violent. It is necessary to understand that the people who live there are not the same as people now. It is necessary to understand that the dead are real, and have power over the living. It is helpful to have encountered the dead firsthand, in the form of ghosts. ♦
