Maggie O’Farrell found the prospect of writing the central scenes of her prize-winning novel Hamnet, in which a mother sits helplessly by the bedside of her dying son, so traumatic that she couldn’t write them in the house. Instead, she had to escape to the shed, and “not a smart writing shed like Philip Pullman’s”, she says, “but a really disgusting, spidery, manky potting shed, which has since blown down in a gale”. And she could only do it in short bursts of 15 or 20 minutes before she would have to take a walk around the garden, and then go back in again.
The novel, a fictionalised account of the death of Shakespeare’s only son from the bubonic plague (his twin sister Judith survived) and an at times almost unbearably tender portrayal of grief, was first published a year ago. An interlude halfway through, which follows the journey of the plague in 1595 from a flea on a monkey in Alexandria to a cabin boy back to London and eventually to Stratford, was referred to by an American journalist as “the contact tracing chapter”. “It certainly wasn’t conceived as that when I wrote it,” the author says of the extraordinary coincidence of her novel, set more than 400 years ago, landing in the middle of the pandemic, not least because she delayed writing it for decades.
Hamnet went on to beat Booker winning novels by Hilary Mantel and Bernardine Evaristo to win the Women’s prize last year. “I felt as if I’d been in the coolest gang all summer,” she says of being on the shortlist, the final announcement of which was delayed until September due to the virus. She found out she had won after being persuaded to “pop back” on to a Zoom call (she was in her pyjamas and the cat had just been sick). It was the first time she had been shortlisted, which seems remarkable for an author of eight elegant novels, whose writing life spans the 25 years of the prize itself. It is undoubtedly the novel of O’Farrell’s career so far (there was much indignation on Twitter that it didn’t make the Booker longlist) and its release in paperback this week is sure to break the hearts of many more readers.
“I think I’ve written three books instead of writing Hamnet,” she jokes, from her living room – she lives in Edinburgh with her husband, the novelist William Sutcliffe, and their three children. Her study is too untidy to do interviews, she says, and I’m guessing too private – she describes herself as a “very secretive” writer. We are talking on the first morning that schools in Scotland are allowed to open, and the house is “weirdly quiet”. As writers, she and Sutcliffe are both used to working from home, but she survived the last year by insisting on a sacrosanct daily minimum: “If I’m able to spend an hour a day with my book, then I can just about stay sane,” she says.
This is not the first time she has written the story of a life seen through the lens of death. Her offbeat memoir I Am, I Am, I Am – which documents her own 17 brushes with mortality, including a binoculars-wielding strangler, a couple of near-drownings, a botched caesarean, and acute encephalitis as a child – was a surprise bestseller in 2017. Reading between the near-misses, you learn that the now 48-year-old Irish-British author (she calls herself “a hyphenated person”) was born the middle of three sisters in Northern Ireland, but that much of her childhood was spent in south Wales, until the family moved to Scotland when she was 12. She attended two comprehensives, “one frightening and bewildering, one less so”, before going to Cambridge to study English, where she met her future husband (referred to as “my friend” or “a man” – rather like that other Will, who remains nameless throughout Hamnet).
Her subjects have included motherhood, marital breakdown and madness – the lives of girls and women, to borrow an Alice Munro title (a copy of Munro’s Collected Stories was O’Farrell’s castaway book choice when she was a guest on Desert Island Discs this week – a sure sign of cultural approbation; she also chose the Pogues, Chopin and Radiohead). Her other most straightforwardly historical novel, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox explores the plight of women incarcerated in 1930s Ireland and England for the crime of being different; The Hand That First Held Mine, which interweaves the stories of a dazed new mother in present-day London with a young graduate looking for adventure in arty 50s Soho, won the Costa novel award in 2010.
Although she bristles at the term “domestic fiction”, Hamnet is an undeniably domesticated take on the Shakespeare story, with much of the action set not in the Globe or a London tavern, but in the kitchen, bedroom and garden of an Elizabethan Stratford cottage. Conceived as a novel about fathers and sons, as in Hamlet, it ended up a living portrait of a mother and her son.
Like Mantel, who in her own words, “decided to march on to the middle ground of English history and plant a flag”, O’Farrell pulls off the equally audacious trick of making a historical giant (the greatest English writer of all time – no pressure) intimately real, both novelists deftly deploying the continuous present tense to compelling effect: “A boy is coming down a flight of stairs.” But where Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell remains a public as well as a private figure, O’Farrell’s Shakespeare is relegated to a supporting role, known only as “the LatinFF tutor”, “her husband” or “the father”.
She first had the germ of the idea at school, when an English teacher mentioned the existence of Shakespeare’s son, called Hamnet, who had died aged 11, four or five years before the the playwright wrote Hamlet. She remembers sitting in a chilly Scottish classroom and putting her finger over the letter “L” on her copy of the play (the two names “were entirely interchangeable” at the time). “The idea of this boy and of his name being used by his father just got under my skin. I could never forget about it.”
After years of compulsive reading around the subject (she has a “Hamlet” shelf in her study), she grew increasingly frustrated both by the way in which Hamnet had been overlooked by scholars, his death often dismissed as an inevitability of the high child mortality rate and their unwillingness to recognise the personal significance of Shakespeare naming his greatest tragedy after him. “Come on! It’s the same name.” Hamnet is her attempt to give this boy, “consigned to being a literary footnote … a presence and a voice. To say he was important and that he was not just another Elizabethan child statistic, and that without him we wouldn’t have Hamlet and we probably wouldn’t have Twelfth Night.”
She may have intended to place Hamnet centre stage, but the character who steals the show is undoubtedly Agnes (more usually known as Anne) Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, in O’Farrell’s incarnation a bewitching free spirit, who is more than a match for the “Latin tutor”. She got “slightly derailed” with anger at the way in which scholars “and writers of Oscar-winning films” have misrepresented her (with the notable exception of Germaine Greer’s “brilliant” Shakespeare’s Wife). “We are constantly told this narrative about her: that she was a peasant; that she was illiterate; that she trapped this boy genius into marriage. She was this older woman, she was a strumpet. There are lines in books by very respected biographers saying she was ugly. He hated her. There’s not a single shred of evidence for any of that.”
The novel is not just a fictional rehabilitation of Agnes but also of their relationship, contradicting the notion that he ran away to London to escape his family: “I think he was devoted to them.” O’Farrell’s joyful version of their love story, told in flashback alongside the painful last days of their son, offers the reader some reprieve. “I thought I’ve got to pull out all the stops here,” she admits. “This is the man who wrote the greatest lines about love in all its forms.”
It was a sweltering day when she finally sat down to write, which seemed fitting as Hamnet died in August; although the cause of death is uncertain, “it was probably a plague year, which usually meant a hot summer”. Abandoning an earlier version, she wrote the opening scene with Hamnet entering the house of his glove-maker grandfather, and “it was like a key turning in a lock … It was the right time in my life and it was the right time in the chronology of the story.”
One factor preventing her from writing Hamnet was “a kind of weird maternal superstition”: like Shakespeare she has a boy and two girls. The novel cleverly subverts his comic gender-swapping, mistaken-identity tricks to tragic effect when Hamnet takes his twin Judith’s place on her death bed. O’Farrell couldn’t begin writing until her son, now 17, was safely past the age at which Hamnet died and she thinks she might not have written it at all had it been Judith who died. Her eldest daughter was born with an immunological disorder: “We live in a state of high alert,” O’Farrell writes in her memoir. “I have to know where she is and who she is with at all times.” She is also a surviving twin, an IVF baby, born after O’Farrell was told she wasn’t pregnant. “In any fairytale, getting what you wish for comes at a cost,” she writes. “It was quite conscious in my mind that the female twin lives,” she says now.
The vivid descriptions of the twins’ feverishness surely recall her own experience of viral encephalitis as an eight-year-old, when she woke up one summer morning with a headache and “the world looked different”. Later in hospital, she overheard the nurse whisper to another child: “Hush, there’s a little girl dying in there,” and was shocked to discover that she was talking about her. “I think anyone who has been through a really severe illness knows that it completely refigures you,” she says. “It is a bit like passing through a fire.” A journalist recently asked her if she could turn back time would she erase the illness. She replied: “No, because it is who I am. It made me who I am in a lot of ways.” She credits the long convalescence (endless audio books, reading and rereading) and the resulting stammer (thinking hard about every word) and helped her to nurture writerly habits.
Last November she published her first children’s book, Where Snow Angels Go, about a girl called Sylvie, who, like O’Farrell (and Nina in her 2004 novel The Distance Between Us, suffers a long illness. The snow angel is a metaphor for anaphylactic shock, she says, and appeared to her in the back of an ambulance when her daughter was having a severe allergic reaction, a dangerous symptom of which is to suddenly become extremely cold. “When my daughter asked: ‘Why is this happening?’ I just said: ‘It’s OK. It’s a snow angel, he’s wrapping his wings around you.’” This character whom she had conjured up in desperation “sort of took up residence”. O’Farrell thinks she may have encountered him years earlier when she woke up freezing in the night and decided to check on her son, who was then four and had been unwell, and found that he had meningitis.
Picture book publishers “talk about making a book”, and she enjoyed working with illustrator Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini. She is just finalising the edits on her second children’s book and has already started on a third. “It uses completely different muscles to writing a novel.” She likes to say that a novel “chooses you” rather than the other way round. “I always try to write the one that I can’t not write. The one shouting the loudest.”. But after finishing Hamnet she wasn’t sure where to go next: she had two ideas and began writing both up at two different desks in her “very small” study. This trick had worked for her before, but one day just before the first lockdown she was waiting in the car to pick up her daughter after a play date, when she was struck by another idea. “I thought: ‘Oh my God, that’s what I need to do! Forget these other two novels, I’ll just write this one.” So she is now deep into her ninth.
That is an impressively productive year, not to mention homeschooling three children. “I think all books are written against completely impossible odds,” she says. “The odds change.” She wrote her first two novels while working full-time on the arts desk of the Independent on Sunday: “I was in my 20s, in London, out every night and didn’t get to sleep before two in the morning. I look back and think: ‘How the hell did I do that?’”
Her husband is always her first reader: she keeps a cast of his teeth on her desk to remind her that he can be quite a harsh critic. “You need somebody who is going to tell you where it is working and where you are making an absolute idiot of yourself.” But in general, she loves writing. “I find it very sustaining rather than depleting. It gives me a means in which to make sense of life.”
It is not giving too much away (the tragedy happens in the middle, after all) to say that Hamnet ends with a performance of Hamlet. “I wanted to ask questions about where art comes from, where writing comes from, or why we need to do it,” she says. “How it can come from a very painful place, but that’s why we need to do it.” The play is the thing: like Hamlet eliciting Claudius’s guilt in the mousetrap scene, Hamnet reveals the “huge chasm of grief” behind the play, which takes on a whole new perspective. “It seems very much a one-sided message of a father in one realm to a son in another.”
Working on her current novel, she needed to know something about embroidery, which she’s never done in her life, so she asked a friend. “We were looking at this beautiful thing she had made and she turned it over and the back was much more complicated, quite messy,” she says. “In a sense that’s what grief is: you turn love inside out, like a sock or a glove, that’s what you find, isn’t it? Grief is just the other side of love.”
