Award-winning novelist Maggie O’Farrell is enjoying a moment of vindication, with the discovery of a letter that turns on his head the idea that Shakespeare shunned his wife. “So many scholars have said she was ugly, that he hated her - absolute nonsense,” says the best-selling Edinburgh author indignantly. “For so long people have been wedded to the idea of the fancy free artist and don’t want him to be a family man, which he clearly was. When he retired he went back to live in Stratford with them all. New research on a fragment of a letter found in the binding of a book proves she was living with the playwright in London at the height of his success in a loving relationship like the one O’Farrell portrays in her best-selling novel Hamnet which is being made into a forthcoming film starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. “Also people talk about him insulting her by leaving her the ‘second best bed’ in his will. That annoys me so much. That was their marriage bed. The ‘best bed’ is a guest bed they wouldn’t have slept in. And what’s not mentioned is that she was automatically entitled to a third of his estate. The idea that she was a discarded woman chucked out onto the pavement is rubbish. She was actually really, really, really wealthy. For so long there’s been this misogyny and vilification towards her.” O’Farrell’s 2020 book is her take on the marriage between Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway and the effect of the death of their son Hamnet, which prompted the playwright to write one of his greatest tragedies, Hamlet. Just before the letter became news O’Farrell and I are sitting in an Edinburgh cafe as she discusses the re-issue of her nine bestselling novels, including Hamnet, to celebrate 25 years since her debut After You’d Gone became a hit. As well as the novels, which are published in 43 languages and have amassed four million sales, she’s written a memoir and three children’s books. Also in the pipeline is her Edinburgh International Book Festival appearance at which she will talk about all of her books and how they impact on each other in “a Russian doll effect”, as she puts it. “When people ask about my books, it’s usually the most recent one, so at the moment it’s The Marriage Portrait, but the question I’m asked most right now is: “Can I meet Paul Mescal?” She laughs. “I keep saying you know I just work with him. He’s not moving in with me!” O’Farrell is fulsome in her praise of Mescal and Buckley as the loved-up young Shakespeare and Hathaway in the film co-written with and directed by academy-award-winning director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland). Buckley is also reading the soon to be released audio book version. “The film’s very exciting. I can’t even say it’s a dream come true because I never even thought it would be possible. And it’s looking absolutely beautiful.Chloé, the director has done an incredible job. She had a strong vision for the story and both Jessie and Paul just light up the screen. The pair of them are amazing. Jessie is a dream actress - she’s perfect for it - and the emotion that plays across her face is astonishing in every scene, and Paul Mescal is incredible, he just leads the performance, he really does. I can’t wait for everyone to see it. “I was worried when I was on set watching the cuts and tapes that the visual aspect would replace the images of the book in my head and that would be sad, but it hasn’t. They exist in different places. I’m really glad about that. It’s OK for there to be another version.” It’s no surprise that O’Farrell would turn received wisdom about Shakespeare on its head as she’s made a career of getting to the heart of the what, whens, hows and whys, like the former journalist she is, weaving the results into narratives that take the reader into the highs and lows of life and the emotions of the memorable characters that people her imaginary worlds. Take the adage that writers should write about what they know, for instance. “I don’t agree with that. I think you should write what you don’t know. The thing I find most exciting about writing is that you don’t really know. Because knowing something and plodding through the writing of a novel to display it is very weird. I like to write a novel to explore something I don’t understand. A case in point is her 2006 Book The Disappearing Act of Esme Lennox about an Edinburgh teenager locked in a mental institution in the 1930s for not fitting her middle class family’s mores at a time when ‘difficult’ women could be committed for life with only a GP's signature. “When I was writing The Disappearing Act of Esme Lennox I was trying to understand how it’s possible that young girls used to be locked away in asylums. I literally couldn’t understand it, so I wrote the book to try and work it out. I did a lot of research, went to the public records office and read admission reports, so the ones in Esme Lennox are all taken from real life. “Similarly with Hamnet, I thought why hasn’t scholarship examined the idea that he wrote Hamlet about the death of his son? Why is it not part of the way we talk about Shakespeare? I think it’s that curiosity, which is what keeps me writing.” This curiosity leads her to dig, often unearthing treasures she didn’t know were there. “For my current book I had to go to the archive and was looking at really old documents and thinking I don’t even know what I’m looking for. You think you’re there to find out one thing but find all sorts of other stuff you don’t even know you need to know.” Her current book remains off limits for the moment as she’s not allowed by the publisher to talk about it and also because “I am quite superstitious about talking about books I haven’t finished yet. I’m worried I will no longer have the urge to write it, as if somehow talking will supplant it.” For now, the silver fish dangling from a chain around O’Farrell’s neck and catching the spring sunlight is the only hint we’ll get, despite my angling. “Yes, it’s a good luck charm to do with the book.” “I’ve got a deadline for July and when I’m not sitting in cafes chatting,” she laughs, “I’m working hard to meet it,” describing her wi-fi free writing shed at the bottom of her Edinburgh garden. “I don’t answer emails or anything before lunch time, which is probably annoying, and right now I am writing every day because I’ve got to get it finished.” So the new novel is something fishy and about something she’s discovered, but will serve up a whole new cast of players in a tale that will take her legions of fans into another parallel world. “Every book has a different engine and purpose. I don’t ever really get to the end and think yes, I did what I set out to do. I think if I did, I would probably stop writing. It’s that sort of itch, I’ve almost got it but haven’t quite, that’s the feeling that makes you give it another shot.” Born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland and raised in Bridgend in Wales then as a teenager in North Berwick in Scotland, O’Farrell was working on The Independent on Sunday when she had success with her first novel, After You’d Gone. Published when she was 27, it went on to become the love story of a generation and is now republished along with her other novels. How does it feel to look back 25 years to the beginning when After You’d Gone was first published? “It’s wonderful. It was exciting the first time After You’d Gone was published. That was a real milestone, but it’s wonderful to see it in its new jacket along with the others. I can’t believe it’s been 25 years. I feel simultaneously quite old and just very fortunate to have been doing a job that I love for that long and been able to earn my living from it.” Looking back, it’s easy to see O’Farrell’s successful trajectory and the hoard of prizes and awards she’s won but when After You’d Gone was first published she didn’t see it like that. “After You’d Gone was quite a slow burn. And I’m glad because success would be a lot to handle at 27. I was so astonished to be published at all, it felt like the best prize I had ever won. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do ever since I was really wee, but people would just say that’s never going to happen, what are you really going to do? It felt in the realm of ‘I want to be a ballet dancer or astronaut’, so I never really thought it would happen. I hoped, but I was trying to be realistic so I was amazed.” Pushed to nail what her books are about, O’Farrell ponders and takes another sip of her lemongrass and ginger tea. “I’m probably the worst person to answer that. I think it goes back to the idea of not wanting to examine it too closely. I try not to think about it.” I venture love and loss, madness and motherhood, family and friendship, death and grief, but also lightness and humour. As for which worked best she likens it to the impossibility of choosing a favourite child, of which she has three, a son aged 21 and daughters of 16 and 12 with former writer now psychotherapist (but banned by his family from trying it at home) husband William Sutcliffe, whose 2008 book Whatever Makes You Happy was adapted into a 2019 film by Netflix, under the title Otherhood. “Well, my books are all very different and represent different parts of my life and different concerns and interests. I couldn’t ever pick one out, but they all feel different and I think that’s necessarily so.” As to what makes a good story, she’s big on beginnings. “The opening is really important and that has to draw you in, doesn’t it, that has to be an interesting conundrum or scenario. But you don’t have to start writing at the beginning. You’ve just got start wherever you can, get words down on paper.” And what about her characters, who appear to be so real you wouldn’t be surprised to see the grandmother in After You’d Gone wandering along North Berwick’s main street where it’s set. Are the characters based on real people? “They inevitably feed into it, certainly, and any novelist who says there’s nothing autobiographical in their fiction is probably lying, but I think all fiction is a palimpsest of things you make up, things you borrow from books and other people and stuff you transpose from your own mind. “I wouldn’t write about real people, apart from in my memoir. I always see my writing life as an alternative or parallel to my actual life. I love my life and being alive, but the idea of writing about it would be quite boring. I think my writing life is somewhere I escape to and I can imagine vividly. “I find people endlessly fascinating, watching them, how they clash, how they get on with each other,” she says, bright blue eyes scanning the busy cafe. We both stare at the waiter’s intriguing tattoos, a constellation of stars radiating up their arm, which prompts musings on inking. “No, I don’t have any although I did go to a tattoo convention in San Francisco when I was a journalist and it was very cool, and I very, very nearly got one, but I have lots of piercings,” she says, lifting her curtains of red curls to reveal multiple earrings - studs and hoops, a cartilage chain and daith piercing.] “That’s my daith piercing, for migraines, but it didn’t really work.” Creating parallel worlds and lives for herself and her readers comes with a comedown when the writing process comes to an end. “With a book you’ve worked on for two or three years there is a process of grief you go through, because you have to let go - the people, the story and the ambience and milieu. I find it really hard because that’s the bit I love the best and when it’s over, my involvement with those people is finished. You feel bereft. She feels the same about reading, losing herself between the pages of a novel. “My husband tells a story about when we were on holiday,” she laughs at the memory, “and he’d decided he was going to ask me if I’d marry him and kept trying to get my attention, and couldn’t because I was reading Elias Grace by Margaret Atwood. It’s a really long book, so every time he said ‘Maggie?’, I’d say ‘What! What do you want?’ without looking up, and he says Margaret Atwood nearly caused us not to get married. But luckily he’s a big reader himself so he understood. She could have derailed our whole relationship and we’d never have had children.” Having reached the end of Elias Grace, O’Farrell looked up, and the question was successfully popped. Which brings us to what inspires the next book. “It’s not always you that chooses what comes next. The books kind of choose you and you have to leave it up to what Rudyard Kipling called the ‘wrong side of your head’. You have to wait and keep your antennae out. Sometimes it’s really surprising. The Marriage Portrait just kind of arrived. And sometimes it’s something you’ve been thinking about for a long time, like Hamnet.” Hamnet was partly delayed because O’Farrell couldn’t bring herself to write about the death of a son until her own was older than Hathaway and Shakespeare’s when he died at 11. “I knew I couldn’t do it until he was older because I knew I’d be hinting at him and really the Hamnet in the book does have quite a lot of aspects of him, inevitably. I could never have written the scenes where someone sits down beside a bed and watches her son die. My son used to joke that he would never have a 12th birthday party because I’d finally be upstairs writing the book. But he did have a party I would like to state for the record! He’d made it.” She laughs. “And the one I’m writing now has had a long gestational period. I couldn’t really decide about it then suddenly had a lightning bolt moment on the train from Edinburgh to London, a very fertile place for thinking, and I suddenly heard the first line and saw how I could do it and that’s really rare. That’s never happened to me before. The first sentence, first paragraph, the opening, is still exactly as I wrote it.” With Hamnet due out at the end of the year, will any of her other books make it onto the screen? “There are a few in the pipeline,” she says. “There’s a script for The Hand That First Held Mine, and Audrey Diwan, the French director, is attached to The Marriage Portrait film,” her 2022 novel set in Renaissance Tuscany. “I think that will be beautiful, expensive though. It’s an Italian/Irish co-production company so should be interesting. And Esme Lennox has gone through several cycles and got very, very close but I don’t know what’s happening at the moment with that.“ In the meantime, there’s a book to finish and much as it’s fun to sit in cafes and people watch and chat, O’Farrell must get back to the writing shed because at the bottom of her garden. Maggie O’Farrell’s novels are published by Headline Tinder Press, with a new imprint of all titles available now, www.headline.co.uk Maggie O’Farrell will be appearing at Edinburgh International Book Festival, 9-24 August, www.edbookfest.co.uk