Amused at people suggesting I have a writer’s block: Hilary

About 15 years ago, Hilary Mantel got on a plane to Russia, for a cultural visit to Perm, near the Ural mountains. Just before the take-off, she had explained that she’d be quiet for the next few hours as she was planning to immerse herself in a new project. It was, she had said, set in Tudor England, at the time of the great Break with Rome, and featured both Henry VIII and his notorious chief adviser, Thomas Cromwell. And so if we would excuse her, she had lots to do.

Cut to present, here we are in the author’s home in the genteel Devon, UK, with more than 1.5 million copies of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies sold and the conclusion of her epic trilogy, The Mirror & The Light, sending pre-orders through the roof. The two Booker prize trophies that Cromwell has already brought Mantel perch unobtrusively on a bookcase, and there are few signs of the immense industry that the enterprise has required, perhaps because Mantel sets off each morning for a small flat up the road in order to write.

Back in 2005, could she have imagined what lay ahead? “No,” she replies, levelly, adding, “I thought one book would take five years. I didn’t think it would be quick. But I didn’t see how it was going to unfold from the middle in the way it did.”

At a combined total of more than 2,000 pages – with The

Mirror & The Light accounting for nearly half of them – you couldn’t get much further from a pamphlet. “I’ve got quite amused at people suggesting I have writer’s block, you know. I’ve been like a factory!”

Mantel has always had a canny understanding of the business of writing. A Place of Greater Safety was the first novel she wrote.

“I just thought of myself as a historical novelist, and I thought, do the French Revolution, and then do Thomas Cromwell. And then I couldn’t get that first novel published, so I started writing contemporary fiction. And then I learned that I wasn’t just a historical novelist. But it was there, all the time.” Those early novels, beginning with Every Day Is Mother’s Day in 1985, and looping through Vacant Possession, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, in which she drew on time spent living in Saudi Arabia, and An Experiment in Love, explored among other things the troublesome double-binds in which women frequently find themselves. Those narratives’ vexed interest in the desire for personal freedom and self-creation, and their preoccupation with class and circumstance, is clearly related to the fascination she has for Cromwell.

I thought of myself as a historical novelist.... Then I couldn’t get that first novel published, so I started writing contemporary fiction.

AUTHOR