33 POETS & WRITERS^of society, whose stories have been un-
noticed or obscured—and a lot of those
people are women. Throughout his-
tory, women kept journals and wrote
letters, but few were writing books.
Researching the story of Australia’s
convicts, I found a trove of contempo-
raneous accounts written by men about
their experiences. Few by women.
One more thing. I was struck by a
l i ne i n “ T he Dead A re Rea l,” t he 2012
New Yorker profile of Hilary Mantel
by Larissa MacFarquhar: “It’s become
one of the hallmarks of literary fiction
that its authors regard their characters
with something between affectionate
condescension and total contempt.”
In a contemporary novel I wrote a few
years ago, Bird in Hand, I had a fairly
cold eye; I treated my characters with
a kind of ironic distance. But in these
recent novels, writing about people,
real and made up, whose stories have
not been told, I found I wanted to get
to the root of who they were, to ex-
plore their experiences in a way that
felt rich and full. To inhabit theirstories I needed to develop empathy
for their perspectives.
What struck you, in particular,
from the essays you read?Gornick: James Wood begins his
excellent review of Hilary Mantel’s
Cromwell novels with a story about
an English publisher who claimed
that the way to write “a good Jewish
novel” wa s to “ w r ite a good novel, t hen
change all the names to Jewish ones.”
Wood extends the quip: “Mantel seems
to have written a very good modern
novel, then changed all her fictional
names to English historical figures of
the fifteen-twenties and thirties.” By
treating her historical characters as
she would contemporary ones, Wood
argues, Mantel renders their inner
lives with the same complexity and
freshness with which we understand
the people around us. As an example,
he cites Mantel’s passage in which
Cromwell is talking about his adoles-
cent son in the familiar way that we’ve
all heard friends and relatives describetheir children: a mix of humblebrag-
ging and making excuses.
I don’t actually agree with the idea
that we can simply transpose the psy-
chology of today to persons of other
times. Yes, there are fundamental
aspects of human experience that
transcend time and place, but con-
sciousness is also radically dependent
upon culture, which is constantly
evolving. What friendship, privacy,
sexuality, and harassment mean for our
children, growing up as they do with
devices and social media and a more
fluid and complex understanding of
gender and race and how power op-
erates, are all radically different than
they were for us as young adults—not
to mention in the time of Cromwell.
Imagining the inner lives of people
from another time, with the same rich-
ness with which we approach charac-
ters of our own time, is a large part
of what interested me in writing The
Peacock Feast. What d id it feel l i ke to be
the daughter of a gardener and a maid
mi of a very powerful man a hundred years
ch
el
le
ro
y