It's understandable, then, that a late-20th-century novelist, Hilary Mantel, working at a much greater remove, should turn the tables and make the principal figures of the Revolution the main characters in In the meantime, what she’d really like is a fortnight off. “Or better still, a month. Just think of it. I could remake myself. And I would then be ready to go with all sorts of things. I’ve always known, even with my physical health, that it takes very little time for me to be sorted out and on the go again. I’m very sort of bouncy in that way.” Is there much point of winning two Booker prizes if you can’t have a month off? “Well,” she says, thoughtfully, “it’s a good question isn’t it?” Louis XVI, highly popular as late as the summer of 1790, would, two and a half years later, lose his life on the guillotine. Even when his execution had actually taken place, it still seemed almost more like fiction than fact. You’ve described your work for the plays as paying attention to the audience. This is unusual for novelists, who write a long time and receive a response only much later. Mantel grew up in Hadfield, Derbyshire, a stony town so windswept she was 11 years old before she saw a real rose. Her family was part of a beached and declining Irish Catholic population of immigrant workers: her mother was a mill-girl, her grandmother did not have the luxury of knowing her own birthday. Mantel’s grandfather served in North Africa and her memory of him is thronged by the men who did not come home. At the age of four, she walked into school knowing how to load a machine-gun belt, and waiting for the moment she would become a boy. “My best days,” she writes of this moment, “were behind me.”

The epigraph to Every Day Is Mother’s Day is Pascal—“Two errors; one, to take everything literally; two, to take everything spiritually.” And it’s the epigraph for the lot, isn’t it? My books are full of flat characters. That’s absolutely fine, because you have to know what function the character has in the book. On the other hand, when you make those characters, you do feel that it’s a bit like playing. You don’t have the same engagement. When you’re working with the main characters and the medium-size characters, and they’re real people, there is an enormous drive to understand not just what really happened, but how it really felt. To arrive at the truth of them. Restriction, yes. I think it’s good for me as a writer. I don’t think it’s very good for me as a human being. A sort of grimness entered into me, I think, which is still there. I suppose that book always was more important to me than anything else. The novel is written in darting, suggestive sentences; the dialogue, in all its stoical tones and elements of good and bad humour, is like a chorus, or a commentary on life and its hardships. Using hints and clues, a deceptive indirection, Mantel allows us to enter the wounded spirit of her giant and the restless mind of the inquiring and ambitious doctor-cum-bodysnatcher. Their circling of each other is conducted with slow subtlety, but also with an unsparing sense of doom.cast of characters is wide and varied, from a conventional civil servant to Robespierre and his acid sister, Charlotte, from Choderlos de Laclos, the author of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," to the naive and enthusiastic Lucile, I don’t really talk about writing very much to other writers. There’s one writer—Adam Thorpe. Adam lives in France and I never see him, but if he were to walk in, we’d have a proper conversation. It would be about writing. And I think he’s the only person I have that kind of relationship with, and I haven’t heard from him for months. Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn in the television version of Wolf Hall. Photograph: Giles Keyte/BBC/Company Productions Ltd I can talk to him or not. He never says, Tell me what you’re writing. He gives me space. And he’s completely accepting that, at a certain point, my writing might be going out to another person, and my emotional energy with it. He doesn’t say, Where’s my share? He’ll listen to me if I need to be listened to, and I hope that nowadays I don’t try his patience too much. I think I used to, particularly when we were in Botswana, where I was so intensely engaged with my material and there was nobody I could talk to about writing. It was me, my secret revolution, and Gerald. Oh, I think it must have been very boring at times. The writer is going round and round, and they insist they’ve got a problem, but you can’t see what it is. Now our relationship’s changed a lot because we’re business partners.

Her novels are Shadow of a Sun(1964), reprinted under the originally intended title The Shadow of the Sunin 1991, The Game (1967), Possession: A Romance(1990), which was a popular winner of the Booker Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale(2000). The novels The Virgin in the Garden(1978), Still Life(1985), and Babel Tower(1996) form part of a four-novel sequence, contemplated from the early 1960s onwards, which will be completed by A Whistling Womanin 2002. Her shorter fiction is collected in Sugar and Other Stories(1987), Angels and Insects(1992), The Matisse Stories(1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye(1994), and Elementals(1998). All these are much translated, a matter in which she takes great interest (she is a formidable linguist). She is also the author of several works of criticism and the editor of The Oxford Book of the English Short Story, an anthology that attempts, for the first time, to examine the national character through its national writers; an exercise only flawed by the anthology’s modest omission of its editor’s own stories, as she is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of the shorter form now living. Her status was officially recognized with the award of a CBE (commander of the British Empire) in 1990 and a damehood in 1999. of memoirs had turned into a major industry, and almost everyone, from Lafayette to Napoleon himself, had his own version of events ready for all to read.Because they live near each other, Desmoulins and Danton grow close, despite the differences in their personalities. Desmoulins is beautiful, funny, and creative, with a streak of cruelty – the novel implies that in a different historical moment he would have found himself at home in Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic circle. Danton, meanwhile, is deeply charismatic despite his extreme ugliness (his face was famously scarred by a childhood accident and smallpox). He is paranoid enough never to put any of his ideas in writing, but is also a brilliant public speaker who can inspire crowds with his hours-long electrifying speeches. No novelist, perhaps, has done so much to widen the range of English fiction. The current, almost bewildering gusto of inquiry in contemporary English writing owes an enormous amount to the example of Possession, which is the first, grandest and best example of that alluring form, the romance of the archive; the scientific fantasy of “Morpho Eugenia,” too, has proved enormously instructive to younger writers. If English writing has stopped being a matter of small relationships and delicate social blunders, and has turned its attention to the larger questions of history, art, and the life of ideas, it is largely due to the generous example of Byatt’s wide-ranging ambition. Few novelists, however, have succeeded subsequently in uniting such a daunting scope of mind with a sure grasp of the individual motivation and an unfailing tenderness; none has written so well both of Darwinian theory and the ancient, inexhaustible subject of sexual passion. While the afterlife is mundane, the real world is re-cast as anarchic purgatory, with night closing in on its “perjured ministers and burnt out paedophiles …” Alison is also haunted by apparitions far more sinister than cardigan-hunting grannies, including her lecherous spirit guide Morris. Dark hints intrude, suggestions of a childhood in which he played some despicable part: a mother who prostituted her own under-aged daughter; feral dogs with a taste for human flesh; a disembodied head floating in the bath. This feels agonisingly literal, but we sense that Mantel intends these vulgar, rampaging demons to stand in also for dislodged fragments of memory, the novel reaching for metaphor to make its point, which is of course about the everyday world, not the spiritual one. We might, it suggests, be just as likely to find hell growing up in a rundown house in Aldershot as anywhere else.

Mantel’s husband Gerald, a geologist who now manages the many moving parts of his wife’s working life, is ready to drive me to the station. We speak, finally, of the pleasure and opportunities that working on the stage and TV adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have given her. “You can reach a point in your career as a writer, mid-career or a little bit beyond that, where actually you’ve got good at doing something so you just do it. Sometimes you need to refresh your practice. I think that’s what the plays did for me. It was the boost I needed to rethink the possibilities of how to work.”In presenting these characters to the reader, Ms. Mantel weaves in and out of the first-person singular: sometimes we are hearing their thoughts, and sometimes we are dispassionately watching them from the outside; sometimes they speak to us directly. feel, how they react, how they think. She has the kind of long view that enables her convincingly to take up a character in childhood and bring him or her to dramatic adulthood. Just as important, she knows how to make us sympathize.