Writing novels crucially involves problem-solving. For example, as Hilary Mantel remarked in a recent Reith Lecture, a writer of historical fiction needs to avoid over-empowering her characters, especially if they are ordinary people. Victoria Glendinning (pictured) tackles this problem by making disempowerment her subject and by allowing her disempowered heroine, narrating in the first person, to be present at epochal moments.

Agnes Peppin, a nun at Shaftesbury Abbey, survives the destruction of convents and convent life under Henry VIII: “No one has understood what it felt like to be us, the ones cast adrift, or how we felt ashamed, even though we had no reason to be ashamed.”