Hilary Mantel on The Mirror and the Light

“I think I made a shrewd pick when I chose this character. Because the last thing you want is to be able to say—I understand everything about you—is a character with a lot of ambiguity. And I think some of that is calculated ambiguity. And some of it is probably caused by the fact that the historical record is erased in one way or another. But there’s plenty scope for creative conjecture with Cromwell.” That’s Hilary Mantel from this interview, which originally ran in March 2020 when The Mirror and the Light was published in hardcover.

Once the Queen’s head is severed, he walks away. It’s a fabulous opening line, that first line of The Mirror and the Light, the final volume of Hillary Mantel’s stunning Wolf Hall trilogy. Anne Boleyn is dead and Thomas Cromwell, that brilliant self-made man, Lord Privy Seal, fixer and enforcer the man who drove the English reformation continues his ascent. And his fall, when it comes, is brutal. You may have heard at least part of the story behind the story; Hillary Mantel thought about Thomas Cromwell for 30 years before she started work on Wolf Hall in 2005. What she thought would be a single book became to bring up the bodies arrived in 2012, two years earlier than expected, because she realized 400 pages in that she needed a third volume to tell the story of Thomas Cromwell as it needed to be done. Both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies won The Booker—Hilary Mantel is the only woman to have won the prize twice…