Her “Wolf Hall” trilogy covered almost 2,000 pages and sold in millions. The first and second volumes won the Booker prize
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThe first part was called “Wolf Hall”. The volumes that followed were “Bring up the Bodies” and “The Mirror and the Light”. Together, they covered almost 2,000 pages and sold in millions. The first and second won the Booker prize. From a niche author, well-reviewed but not much bought, she emerged into the literary dazzle as a celebrity, with a look of permanent delight and surprise.
Her left eye was the seer, the peeled one. With this she looked on other people, “winding their fabric back onto the bolt and pricing them by the yard”. On her daily walks to convent school she “did” the weather, pinning it down until she had a perfect paragraph. Through that eye, the world was acute and strange. Sunlight lay “pale as the flesh of a lemon”. The air was “clotted, jaundiced”. Her dreams persisted like “the dim leaf-mould interiors of a copse”.
In particular she was haunted by children that would never be born: the children expected of all women or wanted by most men, especially kings; those lost by miscarriage, and the child she imagined she and her husband Gerald would soon have, after their youthful marriage. She was to be called Catriona. The unborn had a way of insisting. But instead of Catriona, books came, half-formed fetal creatures that brought the lost and dead into being.
Slowly, then, they appeared. Eighteen years elapsed between her first researches into the French revolution and the publication of “A Place of Greater Safety”, her massive revolutionary novel. Few wanted such a thing. She drilled her way into the cultural establishment by writing contemporary novels instead, but slightly regretted it. Literary fashions and London sets left her cold; she was always an outsider in that world.
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