Or, rather, it has been seen as its own fusty fashion, relentlessly uncontemporary and easy to caricature, filled with mothballed characters who wear costumes rather than clothes, use words like “Prithee!” while having modern-day thoughts, and occasionally encounter villains immediately recognizable by their yellow teeth or suspicious smell.

Historical fiction, by contrast, has not been in fashion. For the past two decades, the novels celebrated for defining our time have almost always been books set within our time, from Jonathan Franzen’s voluminous social comedies to Sally Rooney’s smartly self-knowing novels and the seam of contemporary autofiction that has run between them. The unusual thing is that Mantel picked the historical novel to do better with. Underlying every writer’s personal brand of self-doubt, this is the itch from which many novels are born: I thought I could do better. Then she added, with a hint of Cromwellian confidence: “I thought I could do better.” “Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect,” she replied.

In an interview in 2012, Hilary Mantel, the author of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy, was asked if she felt any trepidation writing about the Tudors.

Shortcomings novel