![]() But it’s hard, now, not to read the “Wyfe to Crookback” episode as being prophetic. ![]() Getting the past right-or wrong-has always been a theme in Mantel’s fiction, much of which features characters who, like Emma and Ginny, struggle to come to terms with histories they’d rather not talk about. It’s clearly a work of historical fiction, the archly period title, “Wyfe to Crookback,” traced in “florid gold script.” (The “wyfe” in question is Anne Neville, unhappy queen to the legendarily hunchbacked Richard III.) Although the woman, Emma, is a physician, she evidently knows a thing or two about late-Plantagenet domestic architecture as she examines the cover art, she notes that the manor house behind the heroine (“a svelte woman, with a small crown perched upon her wimple”) has “anachronistic chimney stacks.” The vulgar font, the clueless art work, even the “fat” paperback’s size, with its intimation of a future at the beach: all this is meant to indict the middlebrow taste of Emma’s fellow-passenger, Ginny, a posh neighbor who happens to be the wyfe of Emma’s lover. ![]() ![]() In the opening pages of Hilary Mantel’s 1994 novel, “ A Change of Climate,” a woman in a railway carriage stares disapprovingly at the cover of the cheesy paperback her travelling companion is reading. ![]()
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