LONDON. Addio!  Farewell, England. The “queen” wants to escape. Yet, she is remarkably English, and she previously lived in Botswana and Dubai. However, she now reveals to Repubblica: “I hope to loop back into my family story and become an Irish citizen. My projected move has been held back by Covid, but much as I love where I live now – in the West Country, by the sea – I feel the need to be packing my bags, and to become a European again."

The “queen” has been married twice and to the same husband, geologist Gerald McEwan. She has been hugely successful in life: the "Cromwell Trilogy" alone sold 2 million copies in the UK. But “I don’t think I have found peace”, she confesses now. Because the “queen” was plagued with diseases, endometriosis, curses. She is the “queen” of English literature, two Booker prize awards (with the historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies), like Coetzee, Carey, and Atwood. Yet 69-year-old Hilary Mantel's life and literature are still haunted by ghosts.

Yes, Giving Up the Ghost. It’s the title of the turbulent autobiography of this sumptuous novelist, published in 2003 in English and now also in Italy, thanks to Fazi publishing. “The written word can easily be used as evidence against you,” Margaret Atwood warned. But that's the only way she learned to live, Mantel retorts through her oceanic eyes from Budleigh Salterton's home on the Devon cliffs. And so, in this exclusive interview, Mantel talks about her pains, the child she could not have, the decadence and racism of England, our fascinating obsession for the past and The Crown, the future of the monarchy after Elizabeth II, “Cancel culture,” JK Rowling and the dark side of Englishness.

Ms Mantel, it’s almost 20 years after the publication of “Giving Up the Ghost”, now out in Italy. What do you feel if you re-read this fantastic autobiography of yours? Is there something that embarrasses you after such a long time?
"I am content with what I wrote. It is a partial, focused account of my early life. It leaves out my teenage years almost entirely. One of my publishers urged me to fill in the blank. But I wasn’t ready twenty years ago, and I am still not ready. Families are so puzzling. You ask yourself, ‘How did that happen, how did that work?’ You come up with an answer, but then the question changes."

What was the real aim of “Giving Up the Ghost” for you? Have you maybe exorcised your past ghosts/demons eventually?
"I think that, literally understood, ‘giving up the ghost’ means dying: a failure of a kind, but the one failure we all share. But in my book, it also means learning to live: cutting free from regrets and memories for long enough to collect some power of my own. It took me a long time to disentangle my story from the stories of my family, living and dead. That process is not complete, and perhaps it shouldn’t be; a writer is always ensnared in the narratives of the people around her. But I needed to move to a place where I could see clearly. That only happened after my stepfather’s death in the spring of 1995".

"Just a short time before his, Jack had retired from work and he and my mother had moved to Norfolk, to a rural area where my husband and I had a cottage. We had assumed that my parents would live on for many years and that eventually we too would make a permanent move to this part of the English countryside. But after Jack died – suddenly, of a heart attack - my mother didn’t wish to stay there. So we decided to sell our cottage, and draw a line under that part of our lives. It is with this decision that the book begins."

"It began as a list – as I packed or gave away every object in Owl Cottage, I began to name and describe them, to capture the memories and hopes they held. We had seen a future and lived it in our imagination, but now we were deliberately closing off that road and starting a new journey."

"Only gradually did I realise I was writing a book. I saw it as a chance to speak up and speak out. I was aware that a narrative trap was waiting for me. When people interviewed me – something that was happening more often – they were searching for a story to fit me. ‘Childless woman writer, devoted to art,’ is a popular story. But I did not like its confines and assumptions. I thought it would be best to take control and offer my own version of myself. I often had to say to people, when they offered some wonderful opportunity – travel, for example – ‘I cannot do that, I have a long-term illness.’ I wanted to add, ‘I suffer from fatigue and I am often in pain – I cannot rely on my body.’ But endometriosis is not a condition that you can explain in one sentence. For me, the condition and attempted cures have devastated my life. Many cases go undiagnosed for years, causing immense distress. I am glad to have played a small part in starting the conversation around the condition. Writers often reproach themselves with being useless to society. I hoped to do some practical good in the world and, more selfishly, I thought that writing about it might free me from the burden of making excuses. As you get older you find yourself less interesting. You don’t want to talk about yourself all the time. I thought, ‘I can say this once, and be understood.’"

"I see now, 20 years on, that my expectations were naive. After the book’s publication I had to say more, not less - about illness, about my early life, and about the business of becoming a writer. The book generated a stronger response than I had expected. But I feel pleased that I took courage and wrote my version."

Was your childhood a state of war and siege? How did you find peace?
"It was a battle, certainly. I don’t think I have found peace. The fight was with my circumstances, but also perhaps with my own nature. I grew up in the Peak District in Derbyshire, in a village built around the cotton industry. It was at the end of a railway line: on the fringe of the industrial conurbation of Manchester, yet surrounded by some of the wildest country in England. I am the eldest child, with two younger brothers, and grew up surrounded by great-uncles, great aunts and cousins. When I was six my mother and father moved us out of my grandparents’ house and into a house I considered to be haunted. Soon after, my stepfather arrived in our lives, and my real father faded away, then disappeared. At the age of 11 we moved to a new town, changed our names, and began a different life. However, the ghosts followed me, and in this memoir, I turned and faced them."

“Giving Up the Ghost” was published before the most successful works of yourself, including the Thomas Cromwell trilogy awarded with two Booker prizes. How much instrumental was this autobiography for you in order to become one of the greatest English authors ever?
"I think it was an important stage in taking command of my life and art. I did not expect much reader interest, but clearly it touched people who were not perhaps attracted to my fiction. I think many readers could identify with it - it concentrates on infancy and early childhood, and at that stage in life we are all much the same. I have been given the gift of making time capsules – I can open one and discover myself at any stage of childhood, as if I could physically travel back into another body. My memory for the facts and dates of my life are no more accurate that anyone else’s memories, but my sensory recall is precise."

"This faculty is disturbing. It means you do not have protective barriers againt the past. But I decided to see it as a gift, and use it. If you can do it for yourself, you can do it for an invented character, even if that character lived a long time ago; if you have enough knowledge about their world you can imagine yourself into it through your senses. Your senses become their senses. Then, as a narrative strategy, you go and live in their body."

Your life has been harassed by physical pains and serious illnesses, ignored, disbelieved and misdiagnosed. How much inspiration and strength did you find through long painful times? Have you ever imagined what kind of person and writer you would be if you had had a smoother, easier life? 
"I think the only use of suffering is that it makes you able to identify suffering in other people – and then maybe you can do something to help, even if the only help you can offer is to recognise and acknowledge that there is something wrong. I am not very well-defended against the pain of others. One thing I learned from writing my memoir is that my core character is the one I had at four or five. (I wonder other people feel that to be true?) I shall be 70 next year, so have to accept myself, for better or worse."

"Being a writer is a self-conscious business. Whatever subject you write about, you are your own raw material, and your own factory, and your own product. You never get a break from yourself. If I’d had good health I might perhaps have chosen another career, one that was less agitating. But then again, given that the themes of my fiction emerged early in my life, I might have ended up as a writer, whatever interim choices I had made. The will to self-expression is very strong, and sometimes stories simply won’t leave a person in peace."

How did you get your head around not having the chance to have babies? Would it have been important for you and your life?
"When I was a young woman I didn’t want children. I just needed to grow up myself, and know I could earn a living. Then my physical catastrophes removed the choice, when I was 27. I was still ambivalent, but wished the power existed within me. No one likes a closed and locked door. Luckily for me, I have never been subject to the gnawing lack that some childless women feel. But I wish that I had grandchildren. It is at this stage of my life that I feel it most. The long-term damage to my body that endometriosis created has been a more important factor in my life and career than childlessness. Losing my fertility was only one aspect of the problem."

In the book it is also clear the sense of guilt provoked by religions, the Catholic one in particular: “Nothing was ever good enough. It's like installing a policeman, and one moreover who keeps changing the law”. Do you still feel like this? 
"I often talk over this nowadays with old (female) friends with whom I shared my education. None of us are Catholics now, but we were all shaped by our teaching, and we are all the same – scrupulous, duty-ridden, painfully perfectionist. We would get further, faster, if we were not always worrying about scraping up to some impossible standard. It isn’t helpful to children to bring them up without praise, always fearful of a mis-step. I think the world is now kinder in that respect."

In a broader matter, censorship, self-censorship and cancel culture have also been widely discussed in this country. Writers like Rushdie, Rowling, Atwood etc signed a letter against cancel culture some time ago. What’s your position on this?
"I don’t think you will find many writers who favour the self-righteous, stifling, fear-ridden climate of cancel culture."

You won the Booker Prize twice, you were the first one to win it with a sequel, you married the same man twice. Are these things linked someway or is this a pattern, according to you? 
"I don’t think there is a pattern – though thank you for the suggestion! I learned in recent years that my real father, Henry, remarried after his divorce from my mother; he divorced that second wife, and then married her again. It is a strange coincidence, and one I would never have known about if I hadn’t written my memoir. Henry vanished from my life when I was ten and I never saw him again, or heard from him. He had died by the time my memoir was published, but the media coverage the book received brought people into my life who helped me piece together his story – and returned to me some small possessions of his, which I had mentioned in my writing. In that way, if no other, the book was a consolidating force in my life. Lost information came to me – though I cannot say it cleared up all the mysteries."

"I believe in moving on from your mistakes – we all believe in that – but I also believe in persisting, and putting in long-term effort. I often say to people who are beginning to write, and experiencing rejection, that patience matters almost as much as raw talent."

You wrote the controversial “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher” in which a man determined to kill the politician for the wrongs she has visited on Ireland. Would you write something like that after what is going on in Northern Ireland now after the British Government decided to ignore international treaties they recently signed? Would some “brexiteer” be in line to be fictionally assassinated, like Thatcher?
"Yes, I would still write it. You have to say, of Mrs Thatcher, that she was worth hating, and worth her place in fiction. (This story was her second appearance in my books; she also played a part in An Experiment In Love. And she has appeared in several novels by other writers.) The Brexiteers are smaller people –  callow opportunists, insincere and devious and often ridiculous. They are worth a joke, a swift satirical comment, a cartoon, or graffiti. They are not worth a story."

By the way, are you worried about the potential breaking-up of the United Kingdom? Are you bothered by that? 
"It’s an artificial and precarious construct. It’s not holy, and it’s not even old. As a child I learned nothing about the history of other parts of these islands. Wales and Scotland were only mentioned when the English were fighting battles there; they were destined to be conquered, and added on to the more important territory, their complex histories dwindling into childish narratives consumed by tourists. I have always been alive to the way that the word ‘England’ is used to include the other nations, a habit that says everything about underlying attitudes. And it is obvious from the extent and nature of news coverage over recent decades that the English regard Northern Ireland as being remote and unimportant, a place where atrocities happened: where the politics were incomprehensible, and there was no duty to comprehend them. This ignorance extends to people in government. I cannot see that the union has a long-term future in its present form, though I would not like to forecast what will happen."

Your depiction of “Englishness” is flawless, from your historical fiction to your autobiography in Norfolk. Do you think we can still define “Englishness” nowadays? If so, in which way? 
"I can write about it because I have always felt outside it. My parents were both born in England, but the generation that shaped me was the one before that, and I was conscious of belonging to an Irish family. We were northern, working-class and Catholic, and to me, Englishness was protestant and southern, and owned by people with more money."

"So when I began writing I imagined myself as a provincial writer – in the good sense - and as a European writer, rather than an English writer. I set a number of stories in France and Ireland, or among those expatriated. When I began the Cromwell trilogy, it was like planning an invasion. The Tudor period is central to the story the English tell about themselves. And I planted my flag on this territory. Though it is a central fact in the trilogy that Thomas Cromwell is not very English himself. Leaving the country in his teens, he returns as a restless cosmopolitan. Englishness is a job he takes on."

"Fairness and honesty was the nineteenth-century English ideal - though whether these virtues were ever practiced is another matter. Earlier eras did not make these attributions about the English. Nor, I think, until recent times, did the English make them about themselves. ‘Englishness’ is a myth generated by a certain class, at a certain time – it is necessary for a colonising nation to convince itself that it is moral as well as successful, or else too many people will dissent from the enterprise. I think that ‘Englishness’ for the 21st century is a work in progress. The country is still inclined to see itself as the centre of the world. It takes generations for realism to get a grip."

And do you like England nowadays?
"No"

In the latest Euro2020, we saw a nation, England, united again after Brexit and all the recent, deep divisions, thanks to the English national team and also their activism, even political (some suggest they are the “only real opposition” in this country). What did you think about that?
"It’s not my game – I only follow cricket – but I think the team are heroes. And it does give me hope that good instincts and good will are still at work in this country. They have shown people by their words and their actions that politics is the business of us all. We can’t opt out of it, and we can make a difference."

What do you personally think about Boris Johnson? Have you ever met him? 
"I have met him a number of times, in different settings. He is a complex personality, but this much is simple – he should not be in public life. And I am sure he knows it."

As your parents were of Irish origin, how do you regard the recent announcement of Home Secretary Priti Patel on migration and asylum seekers? Is this the ugliest side of the new “Global Britain” post Brexit?
"It was my grandparents’ generation who were immigrants; sometimes my life gets confused with my fiction, because a number of my characters have Irish parents. We see the ugly face of contemporary Britain in the people on the beaches abusing exhausted refugees even as they scramble to the shore. It makes one ashamed. And ashamed, of course to be living in the nation that elected this government, and allows itself to be led by it."

Do you think Britain and England are places of “systemic racism” as Black Lives Matter and other activists say? Is England more racist than in the past?
"To me – but what would I know? – it seems that we are going in the right direction, and most people aren’t as racist or misogynistic as they were  when I was growing up. But once sexual and racial discrimination are ‘baked in’ to a country’s opinions and institutions, it takes generations to scrub them out; language may be made over, but real-world change takes longer. I fully concede that the changes may be cosmetic, and I have great sympathy with those who say radical action is needed."

How much are we obsessed with the Past, in this eternal, dystopian present? You won the Booker Prize with the Cromwell trilogy, the most beloved/followed English tv series (The Crown, Downton Abbey) are from a magical past. How would you explain this and the incredible English/British “soft power”? Is it going to last?

"It is true the country runs on the memory of power, but this resource is becoming exhausted. Our present government sends mixed signals – boasting of ‘global Britain,’ while at the same time diminishing the country’s standing by cutting foreign aid, as if this was a broken little country that couldn’t afford to keep its promises. It may be the idea of ‘soft power’ is too subtle for them."

"I’d hate to think I was part of the nostalgia industry, or that I take a romantic view of British history. What my historical novels tell people is that much of what they have been taught is not well-founded, and that the truth (as far as we can get it) is more complex and interesting than the legend, and therefore worth digging out. I want to alert my readers that history is a valuable discipline but not a pure one, and that there are fashions in historical thinking, and that a constant process of re-evaluation is necessary."

This brings me to a specific question on Monarchy, another very familiar subject for you. Why is the British Monarchy the most beloved and celebrated worldwide, in the fictional and real world?  Because of its past? Because of a legendary personality like Queen Elizabeth II? And, without/after her, do you think this Monarchy is going to last?
"Elizabeth II has demonstrated an amazing ability to subsume her individuality into the institution she represents. I think the monarchy will go on for a generation or two, but I don’t know if any successor will be capable of that incredible disappearing act. And why should they be? It’s a huge, pointless sacrifice for an individual, and an unreasonable thing to ask – especially as the incoming monarch is a man of knowledge and experience."

"The popularity of monarchy as an institution is something that baffles me. I don’t want to think that people are naturally slavish, and actually enjoy inequality, though I understand that they prefer change to continuity. I might breathe easier in a republic, and may be able to arrange it. I hope to loop back into my family story and become an Irish citizen. Our projected move has been held back by Covid, but much as I love where I live now – in the West Country, by the sea – I feel the need to be packing my bags, and to become a European again."

You are also a great example and symbol for all the women in this country and worldwide. Are you optimistic about the future of women’s equality?
"I would say, as I did above, that from where I stand, the world seems to be getting better. But I would hardly feel that if I were a young Afghan."

From the point of view of a woman, what’s your opinion on the TERF-accusations against your colleague JK Rowling? I recently interviewed Margaret Atwood and she defended her. What’s your opinion about all this?
"I have never met JK Rowling, but I know her to be a woman who has brought much pleasure and done much good. I think the attacks on her were unjustified and shameful. It is barbaric that a tiny minority should take command of public discourse and terrify those who disagree with them."

"I recently found myself ‘misgendered.’ I received a university publication, with news items relating to alumni, where I was referred to as ‘they,’ not ‘she.’ My books were ‘their books.’ I wasn’t singled out – the other alumni were similarly treated."

"I thought, ‘Being a woman means a lot to me. My sense of it has been tested. I have thought deeply about it. I value it, even though it has meant struggle and pain. I do not want my womanhood confiscated in print. It is not right to deprive an individual of identity on a whim, and make him or her into something neuter, plural. I have not given my consent to become a grammatical error.’"

"I almost wrote to protest. But my husband said, ‘It’s a fad. It will pass.’ I think he’s probably right, and the controversy will become a footnote in cultural history."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.