Wolf Hall
"Thomas Cromwell is sexy"
Books Read in March:
Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel) *
The Browser’s Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading (Geoffrey O’Brien)
Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination (A.D. Nuttall)
Love Lessons: A Wartime Diary (Joan Wyndham)
Actress (Anne Enright, read by the author) *
Downright Dencey (Caroline Dale Snedeker) *
The Miracle of Language (Richard Lederer)
The Newton Letter (John Banville)
A Beautiful Loan (Mary Costello)
The Rachel Papers (Martin Amis)
The Beckoning Road (Caroline Dale Snedeker) *
Brawler: Stories (Lauren Groff)
Bring Up the Bodies (Hilary Mantel) *
Books Bought:
Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (Madeleine L’Engle)
The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels (Doris Lessing)
The Browser’s Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading (O’Brien)
Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape (Manchán Magan)
Brawler (Groff)
Amsterdam (Ian McEwan)
Troubles (J.G. Farrell)
A Writer’s Notebook (W. Somerset Maugham)
Interpretations of Love (Jane Campbell)
The Newton Letter (Banville)
In the Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy (Jane Brox)
Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen (Alice Loxton)
Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression (ed. Nell Casey)
Asymmetry (Lisa Halliday)
A Beautiful Loan (Costello)
Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out (Shannon Reed)
The Post-Office Girl (Stefan Zweig, trans. Joel Rotenberg)
The Seven Sisters (Margaret Drabble)
Best Small Fictions: 2025 (ed. Robert Shapard)
Books Libraried:
The Rachel Papers (Amis)
“‘Seven years she schemed to be queen, and God protect us from answered prayers.’” (Wolf Hall)
For eleven years, I’ve been having a love affair.
In my memory, it starts in a roundabout way, in a public library, when, half-blind with a migraine, I brave the nonfiction section to borrow Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel’s memoir on chronic pain and lifelong ill-health. In this memory, Mantel’s name was familiar from a reference in an Elizabeth Knox interview, at the back of one of her YA books, the low-fantasy novel Dreamhunter:
Interviewer: Who is your favorite fictional character?
Knox: Camille Desmoulins in Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. Of course, Desmoulins is a historical figure (French Revolution), but Mantel’s Desmoulins is wonderful and strange and tragic and lovable.
In reality, the chronology of exposure was different (confirmed by dated reading lists and library notifications). In both versions, 2015 was my Mantel year.
Wolf Hall - fin. May 3rd, 2015
Bring Up the Bodies - fin. May 21st, 2015
A Place of Greater Safety - fin. December 27th, 2015
Giving Up the Ghost - fin. December 28th, 2015
This makes more sense: in 2015, it’s unlikely I ever would have reached for a memoir unless I’d already devoured an author’s novels and decided to be obsessed with them (it took another few years for me to slough off my grudge against nonfiction). But the gaps in my memory refuse to corroborate reality.
For instance: since the first time I read Wolf Hall I read W.’s copy, I must have mentioned Mantel during a visit (did I spot the book on the kitchen table? or bring up the Knox interview?), but I have no memory of it. And while I usually, shamelessly, made off with books “borrowed” from W., I did return that one; while I bought and gifted at least two copies, I didn’t own my own Wolf Hall until 2020, when I ordered a matching set of hardcovers (which meant a grueling half-decade of liberating library copies, alongside several rounds of audiobook listening). And while I know I’ve read the entirely of Wolf Hall three times and Bring Up the Bodies twice (and am currently wending through my first reread of The Mirror and the Light), no record exists for how many times I’ve read chunks and chapters on trains and in armchairs, revisiting favorite scenes, lists, and revelations. I spent an entire afternoon searching for Anne Boleyn’s yellow dress in October 2020, in the wrong book: a patchwork reread undocumented except in memory.
Anne the queen wears yellow, as she did when she first appeared at court, dancing in a masque: the year, 1522. Everyone remembers it, or they say they do: Boleyn’s second daughter with her bold dark eyes, her speed, her grace. The fashion for yellow had started among the wealthy in Basle; for a few months, if a draper could get hold of it, he could make a killing. And then suddenly it was everywhere, in sleeves and hose and even hairbands for those who couldn’t afford more than a sliver. By the time of Anne’s debut it had slid down the scale abroad; in the domains of the Emperor, you’d see a woman in a brothel hoisting her fat dugs and tight-lacing her yellow bodice.
— Bring Up the Bodies
It is difficult to “document,” or articulate, how that passage has conflated in my head with one about Wolsey’s discarded cardinal’s robes, so that, whenever I read either, I think of both. That, in fallible memory, I remember them as one continuous passage, the dead in conversation with each other. What I was looking for, in 2020, was Anne’s yellow petticoat—which never existed, within these novels.
The cardinal’s scarlet clothes now lie folded and empty. They cannot be wasted. They will be cut up and become other garments. Who knows where they will get to over the years? Your eye will be taken by a crimson cushion or a patch of red on a banner or ensign. You will see a glimpse of them in a man’s inner sleeve or in the flash of a whore’s petticoat.
— Wolf Hall
The linear 2015 reading list also does not include some of the details: that before I read A Place of Greater Safety that December, I failed to read it in May and July. That I enjoyed but wasn’t overwhelmed by The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher in 2017, only to stumble into delight when I found Learning to Talk in 2018. That the quip of Mantel Pieces’ title inspired my nickname for L., to whose wedding I brought A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing as a plus-one. That I have tucked passages into syllabi and lesson plans, and giggled with F. in balcony seating as a renowned academic at a literary festival credited Mantel with being the reason “Thomas Cromwell is sexy.”
What is also not included is that I never returned to The Giant O’Brien, after an aborted attempt to read it in 2018 for grad school. And despite owning Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An Experiment in Love, and Fludd, I’ve never read them—or any of Mantel’s other novels. A quiet worry seems to approach, each time I inspect their spines, that they’ll disappoint me. And, really, what I’d prefer to do is pick up Wolf Hall again.
I will not argue with the brilliance of “‘So now get up.’” Or with the narrative impact—across the entire trilogy—of Cromwell’s relationship with Cardinal Wolsey. What I will admit is that I am often a simple soul, and, reading historical fiction, tend toward impatience. I am notoriously itchy during the introductory period. Those opening chapters grate, as I resist a book’s efforts to bring me into the story. The first 20-100 pages of historical novels are often a slog, for me, as I struggle to find my feet, learn the author’s approach to the world of the past, and am coaxed into caring about the various characters. So it was not the opening pages of Wolf Hall which grabbed me, the first time I read them. I was too busy waiting for the Tudors to arrive.
At this distance, I can’t tell you the exact moment I slid inside. But I think it might have been during the “An Occult History of Britain” chapter, which starts on pg. 65, spans 88 pages, begins with a race of giants, includes the introduction of Anne Boleyn and the musings of a man who has spent his coming-of-age on foreign shores, and ends with trials and death.
Why do we love a book? And what is the precise moment we decide to? (Is love ever a decision, or only a slipping off of reason, even as we hold out justification after justification? I love it because does not get at, or touch, the feeling. An example: I love how Mantel uses grammar, in the trilogy; it would not be accurate to say the usage of grammar is why I love the novels.) A truth that has been bandied about in every bookclub I have ever been a part of is that it is much easier to explain why you disliked a book than to articulate why you loved one.
I am not a parent: I do have a favorite. As a whole, the trilogy is incredible, but Wolf Hall is the novel I return to most frequently. It is, irresistibly, a book about lawyers—about the precision, slipperiness, and adaptability of legality. I think this is rather beautiful. And while the law continues to play a dominating role in Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light (“When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when he [Cromwell] says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did the court find them so?’” Bring Up the Bodies), the interplay with religion, in a very intellectually argumentative, legalistic way, is strongest in Wolf Hall. It is a book which cultivates respect and empathy for martyrs and causes the reader doesn’t believe in; the characters spar with one another while the reader’s own beliefs and perceptions jostle alongside, a silent observer. It is a book that pulls you in, entirely convincing as well as beloved.
“‘I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life.’”
It’s been barely four months since I reread Wolf Hall, and when I went looking for a specific passage to reference, to finish putting this missive together, I started yearning to pick it up again. It is a novel so easy, so satisfying, to sink back into.
In her essay “Our True Entertainment Was Arguing” (found in the collection All Things Are Too Small), Becca Rothfeld writes, “To open [Norman Rush’s] Mating is to begin a conversation so agile that it cannot be permitted to finish. I want to be reading Mating constantly; I want to have been reading Mating forever, but always for the first time; I want everything in my life to be Mating and nothing but Mating, including this essay.” While I cannot agree entirely, as I appreciate and enjoy Wolf Hall more with rereading than I did the first time, the sentiment, in general, is shared.
I want to be reading Wolf Hall constantly, forever and always. Anon, I will be.
Recommendations:
While I am highly critical of the entrants, historical fiction remains my favorite sub-genre of literary fiction. None of the below books are really “like” Wolf Hall: the Tudors do not feature, the writing styles are diverse (Mantel’s is unreplicable, anyway). However. They are all novels I have greatly enjoyed, all have an epic or life-long quality; all have given me a chance to live in that foreign country we call the Past.
The Life Class trilogy (Pat Barker)
The Children’s Book (A.S. Byatt)
The Siege (Helen Dunmore)
The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (Anne Enright)
The Parisian (Isabella Hammad)
The Matchbox Girl (Alice Jolly)
The Moor’s Account (Laila Lalami)
Consequences (Penelope Lively)
The Visible World (Mark Slouka)
The Corner That Held Them (Sylvia Townsend Warner)
The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead)
The Passion (Jeanette Winterson)