Books: Through the glass, darkly

British writer Hilary mantel met Margaret Thatcher in 1970 and couldn't believe her lack of sensitivity.

A brief glimpse through a window of Margaret Thatcher leaving hospital gradually morphed into a vision of murder, writes Stephen Jewell.

Like many authors, Hilary Mantel wonders what might have been. Looking out of the bedroom window of her Windsor flat in August 1983, she spotted British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher leaving a hospital after a routine operation. Now, three decades later, that random moment is at the heart of The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher, the title story of the writer's new short story collection.

"That's the story that has taken me the longest because it started in my mind on the very day that I mention in the book," she says. "I was right there. All I've done in the story is move the setting to the house next door, which was more or less a mirror image of mine anyway."

Centring around a woman who inadvertently lets an IRA sniper into her house before finding herself becoming emotionally involved with his cause, the story has provoked a storm of controversy in Britain. Criticised by several Tory MPs for its apparent insensitivity, it was published in the Guardian after the Daily Telegraph pulled out of a deal to print it. But although she has described the Conservative leader as "an anti-feminist" and "a psychological transvestite", Mantel denies that it is simply wish fulfillment.

"It isn't me who is standing there in the story but someone is standing there, so someone saw it," she says. "Your eye judges the distance and you immediately think, 'Someone missed their chance there.' That's where the story started but I couldn't find the rest of it. I had innumerable goes at it and then in the end I thought, 'Go on, this must be possible.' I decided I was going to stay in the house until I cracked it. Even then it was toil but I was pleased to have just got it on to the page, at least."

Despite its provocative subject matter, The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher isn't about the Conservative leader herself but more about the often-devastating impact her policies had on ordinary people. "She's the focus, she's the target but she doesn't have a speaking part."

Mantel was inspired to weave the grocer's daughter who became Britain's only female Prime Minister into her 1996 novel An Experiment In Love after meeting her in 1970 during her student days at the London School of Economics. "It was when she was Minister of Education. Once again I witnessed her and she doesn't actually speak in the book either but she is observed."

Having encountered her in the flesh, Mantel was far from impressed. "My first thoughts were 'bad frock'," she says. "She seriously misjudged the occasion and the people she was among. I couldn't believe her lack of sensitivity in regard to the tone with which she talked about the university system and towards the girls who had fought very hard for their place when she came to dinner at our hall of residence wearing a dress suitable for a cocktail party. The women university lecturers, who were fellow guests, had all come straight from the coalface in their baggy cord skirts and unravelling sweaters. They were good, serious women. The whole thing was uncomfortable, although not for her, only for the people looking at her. She just seemed impervious."

Mantel insists that her timing of The Assassination wasn't influenced by Margaret Thatcher's death last April. "That doesn't matter, because if I'd been able to finish it while she was alive I would have done so," she says. "She wasn't assassinated, so I don't think the issue of bad taste enters into it. That was just coincidental, although it might have been a bit harder to publish it in her lifetime."

However, Mantel admits some sympathy for Thatcher because of how she was depicted in the film The Iron Lady, for which Meryl Streep won Best Actress at the 2011 Academy Awards. "I hated it," she says. "I almost felt angry on her behalf. I thought, 'You don't understand her, you have to take this woman seriously.' They turned her into a bit of a joke, as if she was harmless, but for those of us who lived through that era, we know how wrong that is. As you can imagine, I do tend to feel badly when I see films or any work that is misrepresenting history so badly and I don't think there's any excuse for it when it's so recent."

Mantel has received plenty of acclaim for how she has portrayed Henry VIII's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, in 2009's Wolf Hall and the 2012 sequel Bring Out The Bodies. Both instalments won the Man Booker Prize and both became best-sellers. Now, with the Royal Shakespeare Company's two-part stage adaptation set to transfer to Broadway after a successful West End run, a BBC television version will likely screen here next year.

"It's amazing," says Mantel. "I thought they were the strongest things I've done. I've thought that before, obviously, but I'd never managed to coincide with popular taste before, so it was a surprise to me. I didn't plan at all for the way Wolf Hall took off. I'd only planned one book and I was a long way into Wolf Hall when I realised that I couldn't tell the story in one book."

Mantel is hard at work on the third volume, The Mirror And The Light, which she hopes to complete next year. "It's going to be a bigger book than Bring Out The Bodies, probably more like Wolf Hall in scale," she says. "It continues Cromwell's story and takes up the story at the moment of Anne Boleyn's death and ends in 1540 with his execution. You've now got a Cromwell who pretty soon after the book begins is Lord Cromwell. To himself he is a phenomenon and he can, in a sense, look at himself as you might look at a comet and think, 'How did this wonderful thing arrive here?' To some extent, the book is about the process of memory and casting new light on what went before. We will learn certain things about the past and the events described in the first two books that might surprise you because they come at it from a different angle."

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (4th Estate $34.99) is out now.