Maggie O’Farrell

Well, I think for some strange reason, I don't really understand why, for hundreds of years now, scholars and biographers and writers of other works of fiction and plays have wanted to give Shakespeare

Shakespeare, a kind of retrospective divorce.

They've wanted to really downplay his wife, who's often known as Anne Hathaway, which is mysterious in itself since her name was Shakespeare for most of her life.

So they wanted to kind of downplay his marriage and say it wasn't important.

And they've said things like, you know, he didn't love her, that he

had to marry her.

He, you know, regretted that he'd ever married her.

He ran away to London to get away from her.

And there's literally no evidence at all, no documented evidence whatsoever that any of that is true.

And I just got, I mean, you know, I originally conceived the book to be about fathers and sons as the play Hamlet is, but I became really sidetracked and actually really quite cross about how history has treated her.

And the really crystallising moment for me was when I read her father's will.

So her father, Richard Hathaway, was a very successful sheep farmer.

And a year before Agnes married, or Anne married, William, he died and he left her quite a generous dowry in his will.

And in the will, he refers to her as my daughter Agnes, or Agnes as it might have been pronounced then.

And that was a kind of lightning bolt moment for me because I thought, you know, on top of everything else, we've been calling her by the wrong name for all these years, you know, because surely if anyone knows her real name, it's going to be her dad.

So that was a kind of... It felt like a gift as well for a novelist because I thought, OK, I'm going to ask readers to forget everything they think they know about Anne Hathaway and I want them to meet Agnes Shakespeare.

I don't really know the reason why people have been so keen to sideline her.

I mean, very, very little is known about her.

We don't even have a record of her birth because she was born before records began in her particular village.

But it's almost as if I don't know whether there's a really strong desire for our male artists to be footloose and fancy free.