Maggie O'Farrell's Shakespeare-inspired novel 'Hamnet' to be adapted into a movie

"It's like winning a hundred lotteries," says Maggie O’Farrell of the runaway success of her novel Hamnet, which was published in 2020 to critical acclaim and a rapturous reader response. A fictionalised account of the short life of Shakespeare’s son (the eponymous Hamnet) and his mother Agnes—the name Anne Hathaway’s father used in his will—the book is a richly imagined take on an untold chapter of history and has become a bestseller around the world. Hamnet was not, of course, O’Farrell’s first garlanded literary venture; the Northern Ireland-born writer’s illustrious career, which dates back to her brilliant 2000 debut, After You’d Gone, has seen her win numerous awards, notably for her gripping 2004 family saga The Distance Between Us and her extraordinarily moving 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. But it was her foray into Shakespearean apocrypha that catapulted her into the literary stratosphere.

O’Farrell laughs when I ask her how her life has changed since the book’s publication. At first, she tells me, she wasn’t aware of quite how well it had been received by readers since it was released in the midst of the pandemic when in-person events were not allowed. "Everything was on Zoom, so I had no idea how many people I was talking to or what people were thinking or saying. I was essentially talking to one person," she says. "That’s what it felt like, anyway!" When she realised the novel had become a cult classic, she was astonished. "I see it as an incredible stroke of luck—you have to look at it that way. You can’t think of it as part of some trajectory; it’s a blip, and then you carry on."

She is being modest; her trajectory from here can only be upwards. This year, the Royal Shakespeare Company brought Hamnet to the stage, with a script by Lolita Chakrabarti (who adapted Life of Pi in 2021); the play captivated audiences during a sold-out run in Stratford, before transferring to London’s Garrick Theatre in September. "It’s been the most amazing project," O’Farrell says. "I can’t even say it was a dream come true—because it had never entered my mind as a possibility." She and Chakrabarti worked closely together to translate the story from page to stage. "We had a lot of back and forth," she says. "Sometimes it was about narrative and structure, sometimes about historical context. She did a remarkable job of disassembling the book because it’s quite interior and moves about a lot in time." Next, Hamnet is set for the silver screen; O’Farrell is co-writing a film adaptation with the director Chloé Zhao, who was behind 2020’s Oscar winner Nomadland. "Chloé knows what she’s doing," says the author. "And she has very much her own vision for the film. We have a draft that we finished before the writers’ strike—and we have the two leads." I asked her if she could comment on the rumours that Agnes will be played by Jessie Buckley and Shakespeare by Paul Mescal. "I can neither confirm nor deny!" she responds with a grin.

Has her experience with Hamnet had an impact on the way she views her career? She makes a wry face. "I find the word “career” quite amusing, for a writer," she says. "Doing this is the antithesis of a career. I was a journalist a long time ago; that was my career then. Now, I just think about the book I’m working on and want to lose myself in that. My life is mostly looking after my [three] children, making dinner and taking them to their activities. I’ve got my daily life and my creative life; I wouldn’t want to have one without the other." Her husband is the writer William Sutcliffe—the pair met while studying at the University of Cambridge and he remains her first reader. "He’s very strict," she says, "and doesn’t pull his punches. He will read something and say, 'Well, this is all right, but that’s shit, and here? I don’t know what you’re talking about.' Which is good! Someone saying something is perfect is not what you need."

Family is evidently an important influence on O’Farrell’s work. In her aforementioned memoir—titled I Am, I Am, I Am, after a line from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and subtitled ‘Seventeen Brushes with Death’—she shares poignant details of her elder daughter’s immunology disorder, which means even a simple allergic reaction can be life-threatening. "I was trying to understand what she was going through and help her to metabolise it," she says of writing the book, which also includes deeply personal accounts of her own near-death experiences. The narrative is episodic rather than chronological, the links with her fiction are elusive but present (at one point, she recounts concocting a salve for her daughter’s eczema; in Hamnet, Agnes is a herbalist). "Your work is always a palimpsest of many influences and sources," says O’Farrell. "Inevitably, there are things from your own life that are submerged in novels. That’s the mechanism of fiction, isn’t it?"

As a voracious reader, she also draws inspiration from other writers, whether contemporary favourites such as Alice Munro—"I would read anything she wrote, even a shopping list"—or classic authors including Jane Austen, whose works she has just reread from start to finish. Some writers, I point out, can’t read when they are in the midst of writing themselves; she is clearly not one of them. "I find that really strange. Would you hear of a musician who didn’t listen to music? I don’t think so." Her most recent novel—last year’s Women’s Prize shortlisted The Marriage Portrait—takes its cue from Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’. It is a blackly compelling reflection of the life of Lucrezia de’ Medici, Duchess of Ferrara, who died aged 16 in 1561, rumoured to have been poisoned by her husband. Both Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait focus on the lives of women who have been largely hidden from history, but O’Farrell says that isn’t what explicitly drove her to their stories. "I’m interested in people who are in the shadows—not the famous writer or the ruler. We may think history is a level canvas, but there are many, many layers behind it, and so much we don’t know. I like the stories of those whose lives are written in water. But of course, they are often women."

As for what’s next, she keeps an open mind. "I’m very much of the belief that nothing you learn is ever wasted," she says. "You might spend a day down a rabbit hole, learning about ways that the Tudors made bread in the 16th century, and it may not end up in your novel, but you never know. It isn’t a waste of time. Because learning things is never bad, is it?" Words to live by from Maggie O’Farrell, who blends her knowledge of the past with the perennial mysteries of the human heart.

This piece originally appeared in the Dec 2023/Jan 2024 print issue of Harper's Bazaar UK

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