Ive always been very ambitious.
But its more in my own terms than in other peoples terms.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Note: This interview was originally published on March 20, 2020.
We have republished it following thenews of Mantels deathon September 22, 2022.
Her lively nature bubbled through the speaker.
This was supposed to be your first big American book tour and it has been canceled.
What are you doing at home in England?
How does this feel to you?Well, it feels very odd.
I should have been in Washington today, and ended up for ten days in Canada.
Im working on it with the actor Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in the first two plays.
And hes recorded the audio book forThe Mirror & The Light, too.
Youve sort of restricted your life in a lot of ways to do this work.
But already most of my April diary is dismantling itself.
And of course none of us know how long this will go on.
Im never sure of what to do.
I just push on.
It seems like its not having a bad effect on your book sales.
You practically set a record in the U.K.The Mirror & The Lightsold over 95,000 copies in three days.
And also I think the word has got out that what were needing is books.
Just in case you get stuck inside.
I live in a small town of 5,000 people and people live a long time here.
Huge percentage of the town are elderly people, and I mean in their 80s and 90s.
Obviously Im very much afraid for my neighbors.
And my husband was coming in earlier with big news of community initiatives that are going forward.
In Saudi Arabia, what I remember of that time is always living under artificial light.
Very small, high windows, and not being able to see out into the street.
And yes, that feeling that you had really turned your back on the world.
Ive been reading about the sweating sickness that moved through England and killed Thomas Cromwells wife and children.
And we dont really know what the sickness was.
It may have been a kind of flu that was an intense headache, and caused meningitis.
The peak mortality seemed to be the young and healthy.
It kills late teens, 20s, and 30s, young adults.
It seems like a different kind of thing.
A puzzling thing about it really, is that people didnt seem to build immunity.
Cardinal Wolsey was supposed to have had it six times, so it suggests it was coming in waves.
And each time slightly different.
Each of the books in the Cromwell trilogy ends with a beheading.
Thomas More is beheaded inWolf Halland Anne Boleyn inBring Up the Bodies.
So I have to find a way of staying inside his head until he ceases to see or hear.
It seems like he feels the blade go through his neck.Yes, hes still conscious.
There is a sort of tradition that Cromwells beheading took a rather long time.
And theres no contemporary evidence of that.
I decided to go with this tradition because it allowed me to take his death in stages.
He felt something; though he no longer knows what it was, he knows hes dying.
He can see his own blood and he thinks, Im going to die.
Within, I would say, four weeks of beginningWolf HallI had begun to draft the final scenes.
I was protected from the shock of it.
Its quite seldom that as a writer Ive found you know when youre going to finish your book.
But in this instance, I knew I had the last section to write, Mirror and Light.
And once Id written Mirror, I knew that Light would be less than one days work.
I thought,How long is this going to take?
I want to ask you about sex.
What did you learn about Tudor sex?
We always expect previous generations to be more prudish than us, but thats not the case.
Right?Not necessarily, no.
So it was up to a husband who wanted children to check that his wife had a good time.
I mean good for the women.The only problem with that was in cases of rape.
Did you think of yourself as ambitious?Oh, Ive always been very ambitious.
But its more in my own terms than in other peoples terms.
With each book, Ive tried to push out what I can do, or tried something different.
I was always just concentrated on that days work.
There was never much for me to do.
What we have now is possibly a really enduring working relationship.
Everything about the timing is up in the air, at the moment.
It wont go on air until 2022, at the earliest.
Did you feel any kinship with Henry VIII?
In my view, he does monster things, but hes not a monster.
I dont think theres any point in writing about a character with whom you have zero empathy.
He was talented, and he was a musician, an athlete.
Youd die, you know?
And as he loses that beauty and ability, hes losing his self-confidence.
Plus, hes in chronic pain.
The man who could trust his body can no longer trust it.
And, he had always been, curiously, a hypochondriac.
He deteriorated a lot in the last seven years of his life.
Having been someone who has had a lot of illness, I have seen my own body undergo transitions.
So Ive tried to bring, I suppose, a bit of my experience to understanding that.
Youre often asked which bits of the books are fact and which are invention.
That each fact in there is verifiable and reliable.
Actually thats not the case at all.
People, perhaps, dont understand how much historical scholarship consists of interpretation or reinterpretation.
Im very into reinterpretation.
For example, Cromwell may have had an illegitimate daughter in life, not in fiction.
And, sure, as we turned the corner and passed the millennium, that began to wobble.
A backwards society, a superstitious society.
And actually, I think most of the world still works like that.
And so nobody can really convince me that historical fiction isnt relevant.
