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Stranger in the Shogun’s City , by Amy Stanley (Scribner) . This history of nineteenth-century Japan follows Tsuneno, the daughter of a village priest, who learns that “to be a woman is to grow up and leave for another household.” But, after three failed marriages, she departs for the great city of Edo (present-day Tokyo). Tsuneno’s rebellious trajectory, preserved in her family’s archive, was unusual, yet even her most commonplace steps are absorbing. Although her squabbles and triumphs (a dispute about a kimono, a new job as maid of all work to a samurai family) can only be glimpsed, Stanley’s careful speculation fills the lacunae, evoking Edo’s back alleys and law courts, its fashion and food. Tsuneno, with her world in flux—the shogun will soon fall—becomes just one person in the teeming city.

The Turnaway Study , by Diana Greene Foster (Scribner) . The author led a ten-year study of a thousand women, comparing those who received abortions shortly before reaching a state’s gestational limit with those who did not—because they didn’t learn early enough that they were pregnant, couldn’t travel to a provider, or couldn’t afford the escalating costs of a later abortion. Drawing on her research and on first-person narratives, the book illustrates how women denied abortions were more likely to struggle financially, suffer domestic violence, and experience short-term anxiety, while women who obtained abortions tended to experience better physical and mental health. One woman, reflecting on an abortion that enabled her to focus on her teen-age daughter and find a job, says, “It’s an ordinary life, but it’s an extravagant, wonderful ordinary life.”

Hamnet , by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf) . Breathing life into what little we know about Shakespeare’s family, this exceptional historical novel is set in 1596, in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Hamnet, eleven years old, tries to help his plague-stricken twin sister, as their mother, Agnes, makes curative potions, and their father (referred to obliquely as “the tutor”) is off in London, writing plays. O’Farrell’s account of the spread of the disease is all too timely, and there is an inspired scene in which the twins, in true Shakespearean fashion, trade places. At the center is the grief-stricken Agnes, whose husband’s genius requires her to bear monumental loss alone. “The place in your head,” she tells him. “You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else.”

Interlibrary Loan , by Gene Wolfe (Tor) . Wolfe, a celebrated science-fiction writer who died in 2019, stretched the genre’s boundaries in his rich and allusive work. His final novel is set in a future North America, where libraries loan out clones of authors. The protagonist, a “reclone” of a prolific mystery writer, is borrowed by an emotionally disturbed woman who hopes that he will help her solve the mystery of a “treasure map” she has stolen from her estranged husband. Wolfe deploys sci-fi and gothic elements—an interplanetary portal, a sentient house that builds itself—to explore the question that lies at the heart of many of his novels: What does it mean to be human and alive?

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May 9, 2024

Current Issue

A Wisewoman in Stratford

January 14, 2021 issue

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Illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Maggie O’Farrell’s moving historical novel Hamnet is a story of deep loss—the death of a child, struck down by an incomprehensibly virulent epidemic—and its impact upon a marriage that was already buckling under almost intolerable strain. The story’s surprise turn is that, though the grief-stricken wife succumbs for years to crippling depression and though the husband absconds and disappears into his work, the marriage miraculously survives, recovers, and becomes stronger. The wife and husband in question are Anne Hathaway (or Agnes, as she was named in her father’s will and as O’Farrell calls her) and William Shakespeare.

The novel begins in the provincial market town Stratford-upon-Avon, where the eleven-year-old Hamnet, the Shakespeares’ only son, is alarmed by the sudden eruption of strange symptoms on the body of his twin sister, Judith: “He stares at them. A pair of quail’s eggs, under Judith’s skin. Pale, ovoid, nestled there, as if waiting to hatch. One at her neck, one at her shoulder.” The swollen lymph nodes, or buboes—the dread signs of bubonic plague—seem to have come from nowhere, but in a tour de force of contact-tracing O’Farrell reconstructs the chain of random events and haphazard encounters that could have led the fatal bacterium Yersinia pestis to the Shakespeare house on Henley Street:

The flea that came from the Alexandrian monkey—which has, for the last week or so, been living on a rat, and before that the cook, who died near Aleppo—leaps from the boy [in Murano] to the sleeve of the master glassmaker, whereupon it makes its way up to his left ear, and it bites him there, behind the lobe.

And so it goes, on and on along trade routes by land and by sea, until it reaches Warwickshire in 1596.

To readers living in the shadow of a virus that made its way from a wet market in Hubei province to the nursing home around the corner, the story has a ghastly timeliness, though it is some consolation to note that the bubonic plague that struck Europe repeatedly from the fourteenth century onward was far more lethal than what we have been experiencing, and that, unlike Covid-19, it attacked the young and the old with equal ferocity.

O’Farrell brilliantly conveys the horror and devastation the plague brought to individual households—such as Shakespeare’s, as she imagines it—and to entire communities. There is no evidence of what actually killed Shakespeare’s son in 1596, but plague is a reasonable hypothesis. An outbreak in Stratford in 1564, the year of Shakespeare’s birth, took the lives of around a fifth of the population, and the disease recurred throughout the century with nightmarish frequency.

The surviving records of Shakespeare’s life are scanty; those of his wife still scantier. At the age of eighteen he married a woman eight years older than he, and by the time he reached twenty-one, he had fathered three children. This much is clear. And then he evidently abandoned them, leaving them in Stratford, where he was born, and heading off to the capital to write or to act or to do whatever it was that he imagined he was going to do. True, as the years passed, he returned from London from time to time, presumably to visit his wife; his eldest daughter, Susanna; the twins Judith and Hamnet; and his aging parents. And, as his wealth increased, he sent money back to Stratford, resettled his family in a very large brick-and-timber house, and made a succession of local real estate and commodity investments.

To that extent he remained connected. But it is telling that there were no more children born to Agnes and Will, and there is no evidence that the busy playwright shared his rich inner world with his wife or that he involved himself in the daily lives of his offspring.

Archival records suggest that actors who came from the provinces more typically brought their families to London and settled them there. And if the sonnets have any autobiographical truth to them, his most intense emotional and sexual interests lay outside the bounds of his marriage. Between the family in the house on Henley Street in Stratford and the poet in his rented rooms on Silver Street in London, there seems to have been an almost unbridgeable distance.

Biographers presume that Shakespeare must have rushed home in 1596 when his eleven-year-old son Hamnet fell gravely ill from unknown causes, but even that is by no means certain. The boy died in August and Stratford was a two-day ride from London, so it is possible that when word reached the playwright it was already too late. Had there been any warning signs? Did he get the news by letter? Or did someone speak some such words as are heard in a brief exchange in The Winter’s Tale : “Your son…is gone.” “How, ‘gone’?” “Is dead.”

If these words from a late play are somehow linked to what Shakespeare actually experienced in 1596, they are displaced from autobiography and absorbed into someone else’s story; this is how the terrible news reaches a character named Leontes. There was no general inhibition in this period from writing directly from personal experience; quite the contrary. When an outbreak of bubonic plague took his seven-year-old son Benjamin, Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson gave voice in an exquisite twelve-line poem to his bitterly painful leave-taking:

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;   My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy. Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,   Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. O, could I lose all father now! For why   Will man lament the state he should envy? To have so soon ’scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,   And if no other misery, yet age? Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, “Here doth lie   Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.” For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,   As what he loves may never like too much.

It is striking that Shakespeare, as far as we know, left nothing comparable to so direct an expression of parental grief. Though this is the same author who wrote startlingly intimate poems to the young man and the dark lady and, in the words of a contemporary, circulated these “sugared sonnets among his private friends,” Shakespeare seems to have drawn an impenetrable curtain around his feelings, whatever they were, for his family.

In 1616, as he lay dying at the age of fifty-two, Shakespeare signed, in a shaky hand, a will that made many bequests, sentimental and otherwise. To his younger sister Joan he bequeathed £20 “and all my wearing apparrell,” along with the right to live in part of the house on Henley Street—the house in which she and her brother had grown up—for a nominal rent. To John Heminges, Henry Condell, and Richard Burbage, fellow actors and shareholders in the Globe Theater, he bequeathed twenty-six shillings and eightpence each to buy mourning rings, and he gave the same sum to his lifelong friend Hamnet Sadler “to buy him a ringe.” To Thomas Combe, the twenty-seven-year-old relative of a business associate, he left the sword that likely would have gone to his son Hamnet, had he lived.

These provisions—including the sum of £10 to “the poore of Stratford”—are the record of a thoughtful man who has accumulated a great deal of property to dispose of, from the “broad silver gilt” bowl in his grand house to the “barnes, stables, orchardes, gardens, landes, tenementes” that he owned throughout Stratford-upon-Avon and its surrounding villages. He was explicitly concerned to keep Thomas Quiney, the husband of his daughter Judith, from getting his hands on the money she would inherit. And he was equally explicitly concerned to settle most of his substantial estate on his elder daughter, Susanna, married to Dr. John Hall, and on her male heirs.

What is famously notable is the apparent absence of any significant bequest to his wife of thirty-four years. Various explanations have been offered, most plausibly that by custom and perhaps by law she would, as his widow, have been entitled during her lifetime to enjoy a portion of his estate. Still, a glance at comparable wills drawn up by people in Shakespeare’s milieu calls attention to what seems to be missing. From the will of his friend Henry Condell: “I give devise and bequeath all & singuler my freehold Messuages landes Tenementes and hereditamentes whatsoever…unto Elizabeth my welbeloved wife.” From the great actor Richard Burbage: “He the said Richard, did nominate and appoint his welbeloved wife Winifride Burbage, to be his sole Executrix of all his goodes and Chattelles whatsoever.” Likewise the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe: “I give and bequeath unto Agnes Henslow my loving wife, all and singuler my Landes, Tenementes, hereditamentes and Leases whatsoever.” William Bird, the lead actor in the Earl of Pembroke’s Men: “All other of my goods and chattells whatsoever…I give and bequeath unto my dearly beloved wiefe Marie Bird.” And the actor Thomas Downton, also of Pembroke’s Men: “I do make & Constitvte Iayne my welbeloved & Constant wife my sole Exectatrixe of all my personall Estate.” The list could go on.

The sense of something missing is heightened rather than relieved by a single line evidently inserted, after the document was already drawn up, into Shakespeare’s will: “I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture.” That’s it. No “loving,” no “dearly beloved,” no “well-beloved and constant,” let alone any hint of the sentiment that led his friend John Heminges to direct that he be buried as near as possible “to my loueinge wife Rebecca.” When Shakespeare contemplated his final resting place, he wanted only to lie undisturbed: “Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.”

Maggie O’Farrell constructs a very different story from the unhappy marriage suggested, to me at least, by these scattered archival traces. To be sure, in her telling, the absent father does not return to Stratford in time to witness the terminal illness of Hamnet. He arrives in time only for the laying out of the corpse and the bleak funeral. Then, to the intense distress of his wife and muttering something inadequate about his theater company, his season, and his preparation, he soon leaves again for London. But that apparent abandonment is folded into what O’Farrell imagines as a story of deep, enduring love.

Though she is in a distinct minority, O’Farrell is not the first to imagine it so. Already in the nineteenth century some biographers suggested that the best bed would have been reserved for visitors and that the second-best bed must have had sentimental value. Hence, in Hamnet , Susanna takes over some of the household tasks from her grieving mother and, at her father’s bidding, buys new furniture for the house, but Agnes “refuses to give up her bed, saying it was the bed she was married in and she will not have another, so the new, grander bed is put in the room for guests.”

As for the absence from the will of terms of endearment, these are mere conventions, and the most eloquent writer the world has ever known would hardly have needed or welcomed recourse to such trite phrases. The deepest emotional bonds may be precisely those that are literally inexpressible. Within his own family O’Farrell’s Shakespeare—who is never referred to in the novel by name but only as “he” or “her husband” or “the father” and the like—is a man of conspicuously few words. Even his courtship of Agnes, as O’Farrell depicts it, is a string of monosyllables and silences: “‘I…’ he begins, without any idea where that sentence will go, what he wants to say. ‘Do you…’”

As O’Farrell acknowledges, her vision of the Shakespeare marriage is indebted to a 2007 book by Germaine Greer, Shakespeare’s Wife. In Greer’s account Agnes Hathaway Shakespeare was an impressive person who has been dismissed, belittled, and slandered by centuries of misogynistic male historians and critics. “The Shakespeare wallahs”—among whom, I regret to say, I prominently figure for Greer—

have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women, and have then vilified the one woman who remained true to him all his life, in order to exonerate him.

Speaking for myself, I never thought that Shakespeare was “incapable of relating to women,” only that he seems to have been incapable of relating to his wife. And I have never been inclined to vilify Agnes or to blame her in any way for her husband’s neglect or aversion.

With considerable energy and resourcefulness, Greer combs the surviving records for signs that Agnes was an accomplished and steadfastly loyal wife. Shakespeare scholars have not, so far as I know, embraced her suggestion that Agnes was responsible for the creation of the First Folio or that she may have written a still-undiscovered will leaving money “in trust to be spent on further publishing of her husband’s work,” but O’Farrell, for one, has been inspired by Greer’s effort to imagine a wife more substantial than the one James Joyce described as a “boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.” And the result is a satisfying and engaging novel that conjures up the life of a strong, vulnerable, lonely, and fiercely independent woman.

O’Farrell does Greer one better by depicting Agnes as what the Renaissance would have called a “wisewoman,” that is, a healer with special powers. Those powers derive for the most part from a deep understanding of the medicinal properties of plants, but there is something uncanny about what she can do. The first time Agnes and Shakespeare meet—at the country farm where the teenage Shakespeare is tutoring her stepbrothers in Latin—Agnes takes his hand and, gripping the flesh between his thumb and forefinger, mysteriously divines his inner nature. She discovers

something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town…. It had layers and strata, like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents…. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them.

It is easy to forgive O’Farrell the shopworn phrase “bigger than both of them” since it gestures toward what must have seemed, to anyone capable of perceiving it, indescribably strange about Shakespeare’s inner landscape.

The magnitude of that landscape, in O’Farrell’s account, is what drew Shakespeare to Agnes but what also drove him to leave her and their three children and the rest of his family, including his parents, and head off on his own to London. As the novel depicts them, Shakespeare’s mother was narrowly conventional and his father, a glover, was a drunken, irascible brute. To escape from them was a necessity. But the budding playwright wanted his beloved Agnes to join him. It was she, in O’Farrell’s reckoning, who always found a reason to delay: “Until spring comes. Until the heat of summer is over. When the winds of autumn are past. When the snow has melted.” Her motive was to preserve the lives of their precious children, to guard them from the hazards of the disease-ridden city. To this end she was willing to subordinate her deep love for her husband. And it is here, in her predominating maternal solicitude, that the novel finds its real life.

For disease and death haunted not only the crowded cities of Tudor England but also its country towns and leafy rural settlements. Given the general state of Renaissance medical knowledge, a sick person stood a better chance with the plant-based cures of a wisewoman such as O’Farrell’s Agnes than with the hideous cuppings and purges of the best Padua-trained physician. Little Hamnet, frightened by the sudden illness of his twin sister, is right to be desperately seeking his mother. But she is out in the fields, more than a mile away, collecting herbs for her healing practice. By the time she returns home, the symptoms on the little girl’s body of bubonic plague are unmistakable, and with every passing moment they are getting worse.

Narrating severe illness is for O’Farrell a personal specialty. In her 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death , she describes a childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year and from which she was not expected to recover, and, still more harrowing, she depicts in excruciating, searing detail her infant daughter’s immune-system disorder:

Her skin is bubbling and blistering, each breath a struggling symphony of whistles and wheezes. Her face, under the scarlet hives, under the grotesque swelling, is ghastly white.

I think: she cannot die, not now, not here. I think: how could I have let this happen?

O’Farrell brings this direct personal experience to bear as she imagines all of Agnes’s frantic efforts to save her daughter and her irrational but unbearable feelings of responsibility. Ultimately, as we know, it was not Judith who died but her twin brother. (Judith in historical fact lived to the age of seventy-seven, dying in 1662.) Here the novel has recourse to the occult forces that had earlier accounted for Agnes’s prescient reading of her young suitor’s hand. Hamnet silently and mysteriously wills himself to take his sister’s place in the clutches of death, leaving Judith to recover as if her mother’s herbal remedies had saved her.

The recovery only intensifies Agnes’s tormenting guilt, for she feels that she somehow failed to focus her attention adequately upon the boy, and she plunges into a grief that is not unmixed with anger at her husband for not being there when she most needed him. Her anger intensifies when, having laid his son in the ground, Shakespeare announces his intention to return to London. But even in the midst of her anger, Agnes, as O’Farrell suggests, must have understood what was impelling him to leave. “You are caught by that place, like a hooked fish,” she tells him:

“What place? You mean London?”

“No, the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child.”

After her husband leaves, Agnes succumbs to what we would now call clinical depression. And lest we think that such depression is a novelist’s historical anachronism—that parents in the early modern period must have been hardened to the death of children, since it was so terribly common—we might consider the diary of Richard Napier, a seventeenth-century Buckinghamshire astrological physician. The historian Michael MacDonald, who deciphered Napier’s voluminous notes and analyzed them in a remarkable 1981 book called Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England , found that the physician treated numerous parents, and especially mothers, who were “ever leaden with grief” after a child’s death. As William Paulet, the Marquis of Winchester, had written in 1586, “The love of the mother is so strong, though the child be dead and laid in the grave, yet always she hath him quick in her heart.”

Such is the burden, brilliantly depicted, of O’Farrell’s Agnes. Her depression lasts for years, and, though it feels as if it could never get worse, it is intensified when she learns, to her horror, that her husband has written a play that bears her son’s name. (The names Hamnet and Hamlet in this period were interchangeable.) How, she asks herself, could he have been so callous as to exploit for mass entertainment his family’s intimate tragedy?

In the novel’s climactic scene, Agnes travels to London to confront her husband. There, in the midst of the general urban filth and confusion, she has two revelations. Her first comes when she rushes to his rooms. She does not find him there, but, crucially, she finds no sign that anyone besides the playwright has been there. This is the room of a solitary writer—no trace of a lover, male or female. On his desk there is a letter to her that he has begun but left unfinished. The second and still greater revelation comes when she pays her penny, thrusts herself amid the heaving crowd, and enters the wooden O of the Globe. There on the raised stage she sees her husband, his face made up in ghastly white, playing the part of a ghost, the ghost, as the characters around him say and the crowd repeats, of Hamlet:

To hear that name, out of the mouths of people she has never known and will never know, and used for an old dead king: Agnes cannot understand this. Why would her husband have done it?

Thoroughly disgusted, she is readying herself to leave when she is transfixed by the appearance on stage of another character, a boy, or rather a young man, with the precise mannerisms of the dead Hamnet—“walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice”—and at just the age he would have been, had he lived. For a moment she is utterly baffled, and then the meaning of it all comes over her: “Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can.”

To perform this extraordinary feat, she suddenly understands, her husband, in taking on the role of the ghost, has taken his child’s death and made it his own: “He has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place.” The reader of the novel also knows, as Agnes cannot, that in offering himself in place of the other, Shakespeare has in effect done for his son what his son did for his gravely ill sister. What Agnes can and does know is that through the power of art her husband has redeemed himself and saved whatever he could of his lost son.

Did it actually happen this way? Almost certainly not. Was the moribund marriage saved? I doubt it. But I too am convinced that Shakespeare drew upon his grief and mourning to write the astonishing, transformative play that bears his son’s name. With her touching fiction O’Farrell has not only painted a vivid portrait of the shadowy Agnes Hathaway Shakespeare but also found a way to suggest that Hamnet was William Shakespeare’s best piece of poetry.

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Book Reviews

The real 'hamnet' died centuries ago, but this novel is timeless.

Heller McAlpin

In the 20 years since the publication of her first novel, After You'd Gone, Irish-born Maggie O'Farrell has wooed readers with intricately plotted, lushly imagined fiction featuring nonconformist women buffeted by the essential unpredictability of life, which can turn on a dime. O'Farrell's last book, I Am, I Am, I Am (2018), was a nonfiction account of her own unpredictable life, filtered through 17 dramatic, near-death experiences, from her hair-raising childhood through her middle child's harrowing, periodic anaphylactic attacks brought on by a life-threatening immunological disorder.

With her eighth novel, O'Farrell brilliantly turns to historical fiction to confront a parent's worst nightmare: the death of a child. Set in Stratford, England, in the late 16th century, Hamnet imagines the emotional, domestic, and artistic repercussions after the world's most famous (though never named) playwright and his wife lose their only son, 11-year-old Hamnet, to the bubonic plague in 1596. Four years later, the boy's father transposes his grief into his masterpiece — titled with a common variant of his son's name — in which the father dies and the son lives to avenge him.

O'Farrell's narratives are rarely straightforwardly chronological. In Hamnet, she toggles between two timelines, one beginning on the day the plague first afflicts Hamnet's twin sister Judith, the other circling back to the beginning of their parents' passionate relationship some 15 years earlier.

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In this telling, the woman we know as Anne Hathaway is called Agnes, pronounced Ann-yis, which O'Farrell explains is how her name appeared in her father's will. She's a wonderful character, a free spirit and healer who, like her late mother, is most at home in the woods. But she's also a Cinderella in her nasty stepmother's household, in which the future playwright — still in his teens with an uncertain future — is indentured as a Latin tutor to help settle a debt incurred by his errant father.

The two abused misfits recognize something special in each other, and the chemistry between them is palpable. A first kiss, later followed by sex that literally rocks and upends the apples in the storage shed, would be heavy-handed in its biblical overtones were it not so beautifully written. Hamnet is, among other things, a love story about a sorely tested marriage.

But before we meet his parents, we meet Hamnet, a smart but easily distractible boy, as he desperately seeks help for his twin sister, who has suddenly taken ill. With rising panic, he checks upstairs and down in his family's small apartment and his grandparents' adjacent house, and is anguished to discover that his mother, grandmother, aunt, and older sister are nowhere to be found. His father is off in London staging his plays. The only one home, drinking ale in the off-bounds parlour, is his irascible grandfather, from whom Hamnet has been warned to keep his distance.

As in her earlier novels, O'Farrell seeds her tale with dark forebodings. Agnes, off tending her bees during Hamnet's frantic search, will come to rue her absence that day:

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother's: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry ... It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.

Hamnet vividly captures the life-changing intensity of maternity in its myriad stages — from the pain of childbirth to the unassuagable grief of loss. Fierce emotions and lyrical prose are what we've come to expect of O'Farrell. But with this historical novel she has expanded her repertoire, enriching her narrative with atmospheric details of the sights, smells, and relentless daily toil involved in running a household in Elizabethan England — a domestic arena in which a few missing menstrual rags on washday is enough to alarm a mother of girls.

About halfway through this tour de force, there's a remarkable 10-page passage in which O'Farrell traces how the plague reached Agnes' children. It's a sequence that would stand out even in more salubrious times, but which holds particular resonance in light of the current global Covid-19 pandemic.

"For the pestilence to reach Warwicksire, England, in the summer of 1596," O'Farrell writes, "two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet." The unwitting conduits are a master glassmaker in Murano, who in a moment of inattention burns his hands while blowing glass beads, and a cabin boy on a merchant ship, who becomes enchanted with an African monkey in Alexandria and picks up a stowaway infected flea in his red neckerchief. With the tenaciousness of a forensic viral chaser, O'Farrell charts the flea and its progeny's deadly path, through cats, rats, midshipmen, officers, glassmaker, and into the boxes of glass beads, one of which Hamnet's sister Judith excitedly unpacks when it is delivered to a Stratford seamstress who has been eagerly awaiting them for a client's fancy gown.

Unaware of the source of her children's illness, poor Agnes is left to suffer the consequences. O'Farrell writes, "There is a part of her that would like to wind up time, to gather it in like yarn. She would like to spin the wheel backwards, unmake the skein of Hamnet's death." But of course she realizes, "There will be no going back. No undoing what was laid out for them. The boy has gone and the husband will leave and she will stay and the pigs will need to be fed every day and time runs only one way."

Although more than 400 years have unspooled since Hamnet Shakespeare's death, the story O'Farrell weaves in this moving novel is timeless and ever-relevant.

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Awards & Accolades

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2020

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Critics Circle Winner

by Maggie O'Farrell ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 21, 2020

A gripping drama of the conflict between love and destiny.

Imagining the life of the family Shakespeare left behind in Stratford makes an intriguing change of pace for a veteran storyteller.

While O’Farrell eschews the sort of buried-secrets plots that drive the propulsive narratives of such previous novels as Instructions for a Heatwave (2013), her gifts for full-bodied characterization and sensitive rendering of intricate family bonds are on full display. She opens with 11-year-old Hamnet anxiously hovering over his twin sister, Judith, who has a mysterious fever and ominous swellings. When Hamnet asks his grandfather where his mother is, the old man strikes him, and as the novel moves through the characters’ memories, we see the role John Shakespeare’s brutality played in son Will’s departure for London. The central figure in this drama is Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, better known to history as Anne, recipient of the infamous second-best-bed bequest in his will. O’Farrell chooses an alternate name—spelling was not uniform in Elizabethan times—and depicts Agnes as a woman whose profound engagement with the natural world drew young Will to her from their first meeting. The daughter of a reputed sorceress, Agnes has a mysterious gift: She can read people’s natures and foresee their futures with a single touch. She sees the abilities within Will that are being smothered as a reluctant Latin tutor and inept participant in his father’s glove trade, and it is Agnes who deftly maneuvers John into sending him away. She believes she will join Will soon, but Judith’s frailty forestalls this. O’Farrell draws us into Agnes’ mixed emotions as the years go by and she sees Will on his increasingly infrequent visits “inhabiting it—that life he was meant to live, that work he was intended to do.” Hamnet’s death—bitterly ironic, as he was always the stronger twin—drives the couple farther apart, and news of a new play called Hamlet sends Agnes to London in a rage. O’Farrell’s complex, moving finale shows her watching the performance and honoring her husband’s ability to turn their grief into art.

Pub Date: July 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-525-65760-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Maggie O'Farrell

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PERSPECTIVES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024

One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.

This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.

Pub Date: March 19, 2024

ISBN: 9780385550369

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Percival Everett

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A Fictional Book About Shakespeare's Son Helped Me Grieve the Loss of Mine

How one writer overcame the grief of losing his son while reading Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet.

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Books have seen me through the pandemic. It’s almost a cliché among bibliophiles, but each week I run across this sentiment on Twitter and Facebook, in long-distance phone chats, over brie and bottles of chardonnay in nearby Prospect Park. And then there’s the novel that sees you, almost literally, in this unprecedented year, plots mirroring the trajectory of your life, reversals of fortune identical to your own. Characters who glide off the page and sit on the edge of the bed, soothing your anxiety with whispered confidences―they complete your sentences, complete you.

Imagine my surprise when an Elizabethan odyssey became a roadmap through a year like no other.

In January I lost my 18 year old son, Owen, to sepsis; the infection swept in like a wildfire, ravaging his body and snuffing him out in under forty-eight hours. The previous week Covid-19 cases had peaked in the U.S. while violent insurrectionists had flooded into the nation’s capital. Grief–my grief–felt like a footnote to a vast malevolence, a ripple in a hurricane. The best way to mourn, I vowed, was to go off grid. I hunkered down in my Brooklyn apartment, throwing myself into a skeleton list of tasks: indulging my wife and two other teenagers with Indian take-out, double-masking at the gym, grooming the cats, hauling out garbage and recycling bins. And I read books—not only for work, but also for nourishment I craved but couldn’t quite understand. The less my mind rested, I figured, the less restlessness would surge through me, like a virus.

Which led me to Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet , published last year to universal acclaim and named one of 2020’s five best works of fiction by the New York Times Book Review. I was late to this stunning beauty, but in this case tardiness was a virtue: I picked up Hamnet at the moment I needed it most.

Knopf Hamnet

In precise, lavish detail, O’Farrell recreates the story of Shakespeare’s only son (also known as Hamlet), who succumbed to bubonic plague in 1596 at the age of eleven. She shifts between decades flawlessly, braiding the foreground narrative with the personal history of the enigmatic Agnes Hathaway, the Bard’s wife and mother of his three children. The abrupt subtraction of one. In O’Farrell’s telling the boy slips away fast. His father is summoned from the London stage and dashes back to the homestead in Stratford-upon-Avon but is too late. Agnes leans into her final maternal duty: she stitches Hamnet’s shroud, washes and dresses his body for burial.

“She begins at the face, at the top of him. He has a wide forehead . . . She dips the cloth, she washes, she dips again . . . The third finger of his right hand is calloused from gripping a quill. There are small pits in the skin of his stomach from when he had a spotted pox as a small child . . . Agnes looks at her son. The birdcage ribs, the interlaced fingers, the round bones of his knees, the still face, the corn-coloured hair, which has dried now, standing up from his brow, as it always does. His physical presence has always been so strong, so definite.”

I lacked Agnes’ resolve. After Owen passed away that bright cold January morning–measured in minutes, the stutter of alarms, ICU doctors yelling across a carousel of CPR–I came to his bedside. The tumult had ebbed away; there was a hush in the room. The physicians disconnected his ventilator and dimmed the monitors. His breathing tube stubbed out a few inches like a lopped umbilical cord, a smear of blood and gauze around the stoma. I touched his curls. He seemed himself, just asleep. Pink-cheeked, slack-jawed, lips a rosebud. Later his complexion would ashen, his tongue loll, slug-like, from his mouth.

Two nurses nudged me aside and asked whether they could clean him up before my wife arrived at the hospital. Fresh linens, a starched gown. I said yes, but that I wanted to wait out in the lobby, where for an hour I huddled over my cell, scrolling through contacts, veering from call to call. I must have spoken, in nervous fragments, to at least a dozen family members and friends, but I can’t say for sure. In Agnes O’Farrell captures that sense of light-headed disbelief, an instinct to connect what just happened with a larger story: there’s a global pandemic on and my son just died.

After Hamnet’s funeral, a torturous affair–Agnes is “hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial”—her husband once again heeds the siren call of the theater. He can only mourn by going on with the show; he’s already mulling a new piece, a ghost haunting a disaffected Danish prince. The Bard’s daughters act out: Susanna tantrums while Judith, Hamnet’s twin, weeps in silence. Agnes hobbles around in a daze, immersed in country life, tending gardens, keeping bees in a skep. Only in the novel’s last pages when, years later, Agnes journeys to the Globe Theater to watch a performance of Hamlet , can she reconcile her tragedy with an art that transcends and sustains. The play’s the thing, with many allusions to her son. “The knowledge settles on her like a fine covering of rain,” O’Farrell writes. “Her husband has pulled off a manner of alchemy.”

We seek that alchemy from our masters, Shakespeare to O’Farrell and beyond. We seek to be seen in our most private, stripped-down moments. Recently I was having drinks with an acquaintance, a writer, in a garden tucked behind a trattoria in Greenwich Village, when he asked how many children I had, boys, girls? I fumbled the tense— I have . . .uh . . . had three boys, but now only two —before segueing into a précis of my loss. He sat across a rickety table, eyes glistening with tears, but the moment wasn’t heavy, far from it—I’d learned a thing or two about subtraction from O’Farrell. Just now I’m holding the novel in my hand, flipping it open, and finding my reflection there.

A former book editor and the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, Hamilton Cain is Contributing Books Editor at Oprah Daily. As a freelance journalist, he has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Health, The Good Men Project, and The List (Edinburgh, U.K.) and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives with his family in Brooklyn.  

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clock This article was published more than  3 years ago

Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘Hamnet’ reimagines the life and death of Shakespeare’s only son

On Aug. 11, 1596, William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, was buried. He was 11 years old.

Almost nothing more is known about the boy’s brief life. Four centuries later, his death is a crater on the dark side of the moon. How it impacted his twin sister and his parents is impossible to gauge. No letters or diaries — if there were any — survive. The world’s greatest poet did not immortalize his lost child in verse.

Instead, we have only a few tantalizing references in Shakespeare’s plays: the laments of grieving fathers, the recurrence of twins and, of course, a tragedy called “Hamlet.” But aside from the name — a variant of Hamnet — attempts to draw comparisons between that masterpiece and the author’s son are odorous. We’re stuck, as we usually are, projecting our own sympathetic sorrow on the calamities of others.

To this unfathomable well of grief now comes the brilliant Irish writer Maggie O’Farrell with a novel called “Hamnet” told with the urgency of a whispered prayer — or curse.

Unintimidated by the presence of the Bard’s canon or the paucity of the historical record, O’Farrell creates Shakespeare before the radiance of veneration obscured everyone around him. In this book, William is simply a clever young man — not even the central character — and O’Farrell makes no effort to lard her pages with intimations of his genius or cute allusions to his plays. Instead, through the alchemy of her own vision, she has created a moving story about the way loss viciously recalibrates a marriage.

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The novel opens in silence that foretells doom. “Where is everyone?” little Hamnet wonders. He wanders like a ghost through the empty house and the deserted yard, calling for his grandparents, his uncles, his aunt. “He has a tendency,” O’Farrell writes, “to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place.” But he’s no spectral presence yet. His twin sister, Judith, has suddenly fallen ill, and Hamnet needs to find their mother. She’ll know what to do. She’s an herbal healer, equally revered and feared in the village. “Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicenter, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s,” O’Farrell writes. “It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.”

Between the hours of this fateful day, the story jumps back years. We see William’s unhappy adolescence as the son of a cruel and disreputable glover. One day, while teaching Latin to bored children in a country schoolhouse, he spots a young woman gathering plants along the edge of the woods. History knows her as Anne Hathaway, but O’Farrell uses the name her father gave her in his will: Agnes. Neighbors whisper that she’s “the daughter of a dead forest witch . . . too wild for any man.”

That’s your cue, William!

Soon, he and Agnes are acting out “hot blood, hot thoughts, and hot deeds” — including the hottest sex scene ever set in an apple storeroom.

This is a richly drawn and intimate portrait of 16th-century English life set against the arrival of one devastating death. O’Farrell, always a master of timing and rhythm, uses these flashbacks of young love and early marriage to heighten the sense of dread that accumulates as Hamnet waits for his mother. None of the villagers know it yet, but bubonic plague has arrived in Warwickshire and is ravaging the Shakespeare twins, overwhelming their little bodies with bacteria. That lit fuse races through the novel toward a disaster that history has already recorded but O’Farrell renders unbearably suspenseful.

Dead center in the novel, the author momentarily arrests the story of the Shakespeare family and transports us to the Mediterranean Sea. Here, in a chapter just a dozen pages long, we get a gripping lesson in 16th-century epidemiology. Then as now, commerce and travel are the engines of disease. A glassmaker in Venice, a monkey in Alexandria, a cabin boy from the Isle of Man — they all play small but consequential roles in the intricate chain of transmission as infected fleas jump from body to body, sowing illness across Europe. It’s a fascinating and horrific demonstration of the same forces now driving a different pandemic more than 400 years later. We may have better medical technology, but our frantic missteps sound like echoes of the Renaissance. They had their physicians prescribing onion and dried toad; we have our president nattering on about light and bleach.

But O’Farrell isn’t merely delaying the inevitable tragedy at the heart of her story; she’s creating the context to help us feel its full impact on Hamnet’s parents. Agnes is a skillful woman married to a restless man whose talents are more imaginative than practical. Constrained by the demands of motherhood and the limited opportunities of the time, she must exercise her influence indirectly and stealthily. The moves she makes to keep her children healthy and her spouse happy represent the hidden sacrifices that countless women have made, without thanks or credit, to support their husbands’ ambitions.

A marriage based on secrecy is threatened in Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘This Must Be the Place’

That delicate negotiation grows far more perilous when the couple endures the death of a child. No two spouses respond to such a loss in harmony, and O’Farrell is at her most sensitive here, detailing the unspeakable anguish that strips Agnes of her confidence and propels William into the imaginary world of his comedies and tragedies.

The dark months and years of mourning that fall over the Shakespeare family would seem a slough of despair after the frantic efforts to save Hamnet’s life, but in O’Farrell’s telling, grieving is a harrowing journey all its own. The novel’s final scene offers a miraculous transformation — no, not a “Winter’s Tale” resurrection — but the revelation that love can sometimes spark.

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com .

By Maggie O’Farrell

Knopf. 305 pp. $26.95

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Review: Shakespeare’s son died of plague, inspiring “Hamlet” — and a new novel about grief

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Maggie O’Farrell ’s eighth novel, “ Hamnet ,” is nominally a work of historical fiction. But its core subject is the kind of unchecked, ravaging despair that follows the death of a child. The author, whose memoir “ I Am, I Am, I Am ” covered the near-death experiences of herself and her ailing daughter, understands the parental terror of a child’s suffering.

After Hamnet dies, his twin sister Judith asks, “Will he never come back?” It is then that her mother, Agnes, first sobs, finding “she can bear anything except her child’s pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusions but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.” There’s the rub, as William Shakespeare wrote in “ Hamlet .” A parent who is not alone in grief must also bear the grief of her family.

About that family, whose surname we never learn: a brief introductory explanation reminds us that Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, lost a son named Hamnet to the bubonic plague. Elizabethan naming conventions were loose: Anne/Agnes/Annis could all be names for the same person, as could Hamnet/Hamlet. Not long after losing his son, William wrote “The Tragedy of Hamlet,” a play about the depths of grief and the impossible quest for justice.

Rather than tracking the Bard, O’Farrell has focused on Shakespeare’s wife and three children (Susannah, the eldest, and Hamnet and Judith, 11). The story begins with Hamnet discovering his twin sick and feverish; when he finds the house empty and seeks help, his grandfather John deals him a nasty blow, just as he had beaten the young Will. Of course we don’t know that. So little is known about the real-life Shakespeare and his family that O’Farrell’s creative license is near-infinite.

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As Hamnet races to find an adult, we meet the petulant Susannah, his work-worn grandmother Mary, his stolid uncle Bartholomew and many other Stratford characters. His mother, Agnes, is drawn most finely, out in the meadows checking her bee skeps, woven of hemp. Although later we’ll have more scenes of Agnes and various herbs and potions, it’s here that we “see” her for the first time — and we will never forget how she guides her tiny buzzing workers “gently, ever so gently.”

Her own mother long dead, Agnes defied her sour stepmother, Joan, by falling in love with the young man (tiny hoop dangling from his ear, as in famous etchings) who had been hired to tutor her younger brothers in order to work off his family’s debt to the Hathaways. Never has there been a more passionate scene of youthful sex in an apple storage room.

O’Farrell’s novel isn’t only about grief — or not any more than “Hamlet” is. The novelist calls our attention to the world around her characters, the sensual, sensory world available to us all (not just Elizabethans) but so often glossed over as we go about mundane tasks. There are lovely metaphors and similes — tears “like heavy pearls,” death as a snow-filled landscape — but also passages rich in detail: “Apples ... He brings one up to his face and inhales the scent, sharp, specific, acidic. It brings a slew of distant images to mind: fallen leaves, sodden grass, woodsmoke, his mother’s kitchen.”

Untethered by dates or events, the story loses historicity and gains immediacy, so that even as we know Hamnet will die, we suffer his passing as a shock: “Her son’s body is in a place of torture, of hell. It writhes, it twists, it buckles and strains.” He dies fast and in agony while his twin heals, catching Agnes emotionally unaware. Although she delays the preparation of her son’s small form for as long as possible, in defiance of authorities, her husband does not return from London until Hamnet is shrouded.

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Naturally — as naturally as the bees leave the skep when smoked out — death threatens to break the bond between father and mother, husband and wife. Agnes looks at her husband as they leave the graveyard, “and it is as if she has never seen him before, so odd and distorted and old do his features seem.” He cannot cry, instead pacing their second floor “like someone trying to find their way back to a place for which they have lost the map.”

O’Farrell moves through the family’s pain like a master of signs and signals. Agnes and her daughter Judith make candles, discussing the word “for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin,” and “Judith watches the liquid slide off the ends of the wicks, into the bowl below. ‘Maybe there isn’t one,’ she suggests. ‘Maybe not,’ says her mother.” The melting, shape-shifting tallow echoes the family’s slow move from a season of grief into a season of change.

But change does not always mean healing. In London, the father busies himself with his writing and company of actors, for “the magnitude, the depth of his wife’s grief for their son exerts a fatal pull. . . . he must hold himself separate in order to survive.” So much comes between them, and perhaps it is no spoiler to say that they are brought back together — for a moment? For years? — by a performance of “Hamlet” that Agnes witnesses, by an actor directed by her husband to behave just as her Hamnet did. “It is too much: she isn’t sure how to bear it, how to explain this to herself.” As she watches, Agnes realizes that her husband “has taken his son’s death and made it his own.”

In “Hamnet,” art imitates life not to co-opt reality, but to help us bear it.

Hamnet Maggie O’Farrell Knopf: 320 pages, $27

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Not the Booker: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell - a moving portrayal of grief

An imaginatively daring portrait of the loss of Shakespeare’s son is intensely felt, but at times rather preposterous

• Not the Booker 2020 shortlist: read along with us!

I t takes a brave writer to put words in William Shakespeare’s mouth. In Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell almost gets away with it. Her eighth novel – which has already won this year’s Women’s prize for fiction – is named for Shakespeare’s son, who died aged 11 in 1596 of a mystery illness, though plenty of scholars have suggested that he succumbed to bubonic plague. O’Farrell goes to town on this theory, indulging in a long digressive chapter detailing the origins of the fleas in Alexandria and the series of events that are needed for, as she puts it, “a tragedy to be set in motion halfway across the world”. In this retelling, Hamnet became the inspiration for the play Hamlet, which came around four years later.

O’Farrell mainly keeps Shakespeare offstage, and we feel him most as an absence, away in London while most of the action takes place in Stratford. Even when he is on the scene, O’Farrell gives him few lines, preferring to portray his speech indirectly: “Gesturing, clutching his hair, his voice still churning away, throwing out words and words and more words into the greenery.” But for once, Shakespeare isn’t the main draw: his wife Agnes is this novel’s star and treads the boards with style.

In many accounts of Shakespeare’s life, Agnes (more famously called Anne Hathaway) is portrayed as an illiterate stay-at-home whom Shakespeare abandoned for a more interesting life in London. O’Farrell has reclaimed her as someone who has her own brand of intelligence and independent life. She has an extensive knowledge of herbs and horticulture that makes her one of the first resorts of the sick and infirm in Stratford. There are many fine descriptions of this mysterious wisdom and her “witch garden”, where there are “rows of herbs, flowers, plants, stems that wind up supporting twigs” and where “Agnes can be seen, most weeks, moving up and down the rows of these plants, pulling up weeds, laying her hands on the coil of her hives, pruning stems here and there, secreting certain blooms, leaves, pods, petals, seeds in a leather bag at her hip.”

Agnes and her world feel real and bright, most of the time. But you do have to accept a certain amount of mumbo-jumbo about her “foresight” and her ability to tell things about people by holding their hands in a special way. When she does this to her sister-in-law Eliza, we are told it is “the oddest sensation, as if something is being drawn from her, like a splinter in the skin or infection from a wound, at the same time as something else is being poured into her.” Later, Agnes finds out about the death of Eliza’s sister through her magic hand.

It would be just about possible to forgive such nonsense as a reflection on the more superstitious world of the 16th century, if there weren’t also an uncomfortable feeling that this book reflects our own concerns and morality more than the Elizabethans’. Would anyone then care, for instance, about the fate of farm animals and think “of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove”? It is not impossible, but it is also not entirely convincing.

What is convincing is O’Farrell’s portrayal of grief and pain. We share Agnes’ terror when she sees buboes on her daughter: “They occupy such a potent place in everyone’s fears that she cannot quite believe she is actually seeing them, that they are not some figment or spectre summoned by her imagination.” We know the worst of all fears when the illness has Hamnet in its grasp: “It has come to them, Agnes thinks, from a long way off, from a place of rot and wet and confinement. It has cut a swingeing path for itself through humans and beasts and insects alike; it feeds on pain and unhappiness and grief. It is insatiable, unstoppable, the worst, blackest kind of evil.”

O’Farrell describes these agonies with such power that Hamnet would resonate at any time. It is easy to understand why it has moved so many people now, in spite of its flaws.

Next time: Hello Friend, We Missed You by Richard Owain Roberts

Shortlist reviews so far:

Akin by Emma Donoghue - daft premise, good writing

The Girl With the Louding Voice by Abi Daré – vibrant

Underdogs: Tooth and Nail by Chris Bonnello – admirably unusual

Hashim & Family by Shahnaz Ahsan – an important tale of migration

• Not the Booker prize
• Maggie O'Farrell

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What Is a Magazine Now?

Highsnobiety is a store, a website, a production agency and a clothing line. Oh, and Pamela Anderson is on the latest cover.

Willa Bennett, the editor of Highsnobiety, at the Bowling Green subway station near its offices in New York. Credit... Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times

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By Jessica Testa

• April 18, 2024

“To be perfectly honest with you, I needed a few Americans to tell me what it means to win this award,” said David Fischer, the founder of the company Highsnobiety.

Mr. Fischer was sitting in an airport in Spain, wearing a denim jacket and a designer baseball cap. About 10 days earlier, in New York City, Highsnobiety won a National Magazine Award for general excellence — its first nomination and win at the Oscars of the magazine world.

“I’m not a journalist by background, nor would I consider myself a great writer,” Mr. Fischer, 41, who lives in Berlin, said.

He started Highsnobiety as a sneaker blog in 2005. Today it is a website that covers fashion and youth culture broadly. It is also a clothing store and clothing line and, more lucratively, a creative consultancy and production agency. In other words, Highsnobiety writes about and recommends T-shirts, but it also makes its own T-shirts, sells and advertises other labels’ T-shirts, advises brands on how to market their T-shirts and throws big parties in honor of T-shirts.

But is Highsnobiety a media company? “It’s certainly not a clear yes,” Mr. Fischer said. “I was mostly interested in finding exciting new things and putting those things in front of the audience. And I suppose I was always excited about building a brand, more than anything.”

The magazine is printed twice a year. Its stories and images are frenetic, meant to speak to readers who are either young and cool or interested in being young and cool. The editor in chief is Willa Bennett, who ran social media at GQ magazine until 2022.

On the April night she accepted Highsnobiety’s National Magazine Award, her former boss, the GQ editor Will Welch, was “hooting and hollering” (his words) for the 30-year-old woman. She wore a gray Thom Browne suit with a matching skirt layered over the pants, and black Tabi cleft-toe shoes. She spoke into a microphone about how magazines are important and how print media matters.

Neither is a given in the current media landscape. About six months ago, Condé Nast announced it would cut five percent of its work force, following some years of turmoil and nine-figure annual losses . Hearst Magazines announced layoffs in 2023. So did, for that matter , Highsnobiety.

And yet people are still making magazines. Nylon returned to print this month; last month, the new owners of Complex magazine and Life magazine announced print resuscitations. In New York, new indie titles like Family Style and Byline have emerged.

Ms. Bennett is idealistic about this future. She is generally cheerful, prone to skipping down sidewalks, even while wearing a smirk that borrows more from Daria than Mary Tyler Moore. She is also uncommonly curious about people — especially young people, whose ideas and skills she mines for the magazine.

“I believe it’s my responsibility to, like, make sure that young people still dream of being journalists,” she said. “We just need to keep iterating and continuing to stretch what it means.”

Ms. Bennett is known to wear a suit and tie to work most days, not unlike the workers surrounding her in Manhattan’s financial district.

Highsnobiety’s offices rise 11 floors above the Charging Bull sculpture. On one wall, the words “Virgil was here” are scrawled beneath the company’s logo. The designer Virgil Abloh shared many of the same interests as Highsnobiety: adolescence, corporate collaborations, the blurring of high-end fashion and “ streetwear .”

Ms. Bennett’s cube-shaped office houses various gifts. She has an action figure of the rapper ASAP Rocky, dressed in an outfit from his Highsnobiety photo shoot. She has a skateboard and a basketball hoop, though she neither skates nor hoops. There is a framed thank-you note from Donatella Versace and a receipt for $19,010 from the Château Marmont in Hollywood, where Highsnobiety co-hosted a dinner before the Grammys in February.

Inside a conference room named after the famous Berlin nightclub Berghain, Ms. Bennett hosts regular brainstorming sessions. It is here, for example, that she was inspired to pursue a cover story on Dries Van Noten, the 65-year-old Belgian designer who recently announced his retirement .

“We were all talking about how Dries is the best,” she said. “This consistent designer that young people can always trust.”

The spring issue had three cover stars: Mr. Van Noten, the musician Andre 3000 (age 48) and the model-actress Pamela Anderson (age 56), none of whom seem like intuitive choices for a magazine that typically concerns itself with young emerging talent. The previous three cover stars were the rapper Lil Yachty (26), the TikToker Khaby Lame (24) — a story Ms. Bennett assigned to a fellow TikToker, whom she later realized was still a sophomore at New York University — and the model Grace Valentine (23).

Still, even if the subjects were older, Highsnobiety’s approach to them was not. “Pamela Anderson Is Mother,” one headline read. Ms. Anderson was a more personal choice for Ms. Bennett, who wrote in the issue that Ms. Anderson’s 1989 Playboy cover once hung on her bedroom wall.

On that cover, Ms. Anderson wore a blazer and tie and nothing else. She wore a blazer and tie on her Highsnobiety cover, too. Women are often styled in men’s wear in the magazine’s pages. Squint a little and Billie Eilish, the first cover star chosen by Ms. Bennett , bears a resemblance to the editor — the bare face, the dark hair with a middle part, the head tilted slightly downward. She looks as if she’s glaring at you, but really it’s more like she’s taking the measure of you.

Ms. Bennett also studies people, more comfortable asking questions than answering them. (How was your day? What are your favorite brands? Do you like writing?) Standing outside Cubbyhole, a West Village lesbian bar, she would only point vaguely in a direction when asked where in the neighborhood she lived with her partner, a television writer.

The personal details she was willing to part with were these: Ms. Bennett grew up in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles and attended the private school Oakwood. Her parents were divorced. She lived with her mother, a therapist who moved to Hawaii when she was in college. Her father, a prominent music manager, lived in Nashville for most of her life. She wears his birth year, 1950, on a silver ring.

Ms. Bennett came out when she was a teenager, she said, in the comments section of the Australian pop star Troye Sivan’s coming-out YouTube video — an anecdote she later shared with Mr. Sivan while they were seated next to each other at a Prada runway show.

She had always wanted to be a writer. “At the time, ‘Twilight’ was huge,” Ms. Bennett said. “I was like, I’m going to write the gay ‘Twilight.’”

But she was also drawn from a young age to the power of magazine covers — not only Ms. Anderson on Playboy, but also Cory Kennedy on Nylon and Megan Fox on GQ. “What does it mean for a men’s magazine to have someone like Megan Fox on the cover?” she said.

A onetime ballerina, Ms. Bennett attended Sarah Lawrence College on a dance scholarship. When she told her adviser she wanted to write for magazines, the adviser suggested she write her thesis about the future of the industry. Instead Ms. Bennett pitched embedding in a middle school for four weeks, writing “about what teens are reading and how they’re reading it,” she said. The project helped her land a job after graduation at Seventeen.

“She really is a voice of and a champion of what young people care about,” Mr. Welch, the GQ editor, said. “And what young people care about isn’t exclusively, necessarily, all young subjects.”

Ms. Bennett, for example, doesn’t seem to hang out at bars or restaurants catering to the city’s cool 20-somethings. She spends her time at established fashion and media haunts, like Via Carota or Minetta Tavern or the Odeon. One recent Thursday night, walking into the Odeon in TriBeCa, she immediately recognized a few young editors sitting at a table outside the restaurant.

She used to work with them at GQ, she explained, bouncing over to the table to say hello. “They said they all work at Vogue now,” Ms. Bennett reported when she returned.

‘Larger Than Life’

By the end of 2005, Mr. Fischer was fielding brand requests to advertise on his sneaker blog. By 2010, those advertisements had shifted to sponsored content — or brands paying Highsnobiety to write positive pieces.

Over time, Mr. Fischer said, he realized branded stories “performed best if we shot our own imagery, too,” rather than republishing photos from the companies. This is how Highsnobiety gradually became “more like a full service creative agency, rather than just being a publisher.” Brands began asking Highsnobiety to host events, like pop-ups or parties related to the content Mr. Fischer’s team was producing.

“We always kept it very connected to our editorial,” he said.

Many companies that produce journalism have strict church-and-state divisions between editorial and advertising efforts. The division at Highsnobiety is more like “God and church,” said Nichelle Sanders, the general manager of Highsnobiety in the United States.

The journalism “inspires us in the commercial efforts that we create,” said Ms. Sanders, who also oversees Highsnobiety’s research papers of consumer insights into its audience. “The reason our clients come to us is because we can get into the brain of this amazing editorial team.”

Those clients include Champion, best known for its sweatsuits, when it’s looking to reach cooler, younger shoppers. Voilà, suddenly Champion and Highsnobiety are hosting a rave together during London Fashion Week, partnering with an edgy local radio station. (Highsnobiety once collaborated on a T-shirt with The New York Times, one of many products created for an event series celebrating New York.)

Mr. Fischer does not worry about his audience being skeptical of these paid partnerships.

“I think people have accepted that brands like Highsnobiety and influencers need to make a living,” he said. While it is an open secret in fashion media that some magazine covers and features can be bought outright by advertisers, with no disclosure to readers, Highsnobiety denies engaging in that kind of pay-for-play.

“They can go through the sales side, and they can buy branded content,” Ms. Bennett said. “They cannot buy a magazine cover.”

Although the company declined to provide specific financial figures, it is profitable, according to Juergen Hopfgartner, the president and chief operating officer. Its e-commerce business is also growing, aided by the resources of Zalando, an online German retailer that paid 123.6 million euros (about $131 million) to acquire Highsnobiety in 2022. In February, Highsnobiety opened a store in Berlin that, beyond selling products, will be used as a “brand activation space” for clients, Mr. Hopfgartner said.

All things considered, it is not surprising that Mr. Fischer described his company as a “weird mishmash of these different worlds.”

Lauren Sherman, the writer of the fashion industry newsletter Line Sheet, said that Highsnobiety “doesn’t feel like it comes from journalism.”

“It feels like it comes from commerce,” she continued. “But that’s very modern.”

And that may be what is required to find success in the dire publishing landscape of 2024. But a distinct, assertive voice also helps.

In less than two years, in addition to winning the National Magazine Award, Ms. Bennett has shifted Highsnobiety’s audience from predominantly male to a 50-50 gender split, Mr. Fischer said. At GQ, Mr. Welch said, Ms. Bennett possessed a rare confidence and fearlessness, particularly for someone who was both very young and technically in charge only of the social feeds.

“She has a bit of that larger-than-life thing that a lot of the leaders in this industry are missing now,” Ms. Sherman said.

In her slouchy suits, Ms. Bennett somewhat reminds Ms. Sherman of the editors with big personalities that she grew up idolizing, like Liz Tilberis of Harper’s Bazaar or Jane Pratt of Jane.

“People who are like that just don’t go into magazine publishing anymore,” Ms. Sherman said.

Jessica Testa is a Times reporter covering the worlds of style and fashion. More about Jessica Testa

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