Hilary Mantel’s writing career falls neatly into two periods: before and after Wolf Hall.
At the time of the novel’s publication, Mantel described her nine previous novels as a long apprenticeship for the first volume in her brilliant trilogy centred on the life of Thomas Cromwell: Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020).
Her posthumous collection A Memoir of My Former Self supports this self-assessment.