They’ve become such close collaborators that when Mantel decided to adapt “The Mirror and the Light” herself, rather than handing it off to a playwright, she chose Miles to co-write it with her.

Mantel has never written for the theater before, and she is taking an unorthodox approach, using her source material to develop something almost entirely new. “If you’re an adapter, you feel so bound to the original text, but I don’t have to put in a single word from the book if I don’t want to,” she said. “Most of what I’ve written now is completely fresh. It’s not obliged to the book.”

Mantel’s work on the play has also kept Cromwell and his contemporaries vivid in her imagination. Even when she’s not at her desk writing, she can still hear them chattering away.

“Once those voices begin, it’s like having the radio on in the background for 15 years. It never actually fades. It runs continuously with whatever else you’re doing, and that means you’re never off duty to the book, you never stop working on it. You fall asleep with it, you wake up with it,” she said. “There’s a point where you’re living with these people and only with them. They’re more real and solid to you than actual people in your life.”

◇ ◇ ◇

‘I am used to “seeing” things that aren’t there.’

Mantel in many ways is perfectly suited to the task of excavating and reanimating the past. Ever since she was a child, she’s been prone to visions of ghosts and spirits. “I am used to ‘seeing’ things that aren’t there,” she writes in her memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost.”

Growing up in an Irish Catholic family in Hadfield, a village in Derbyshire, Mantel was obsessed with myths, folklore and the supernatural. Before she was old enough to read, she insisted that relatives read to her tales from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. “I had a head stuffed full of chivalric epigrams, and the self-confidence that comes from a thorough knowledge of horsemanship and swordplay,” she writes.

At 18, she went to the London School of Economics to study law, with the hope of becoming a barrister, but she couldn’t afford to continue with professional training. By then, she’d met McEwen. They married when they were 20 and moved to Manchester, where he found a teaching position and she worked various jobs and started writing.