The most successful recent novel to have featured her as a character was the first instalment in SJ Bennett’s Windsor Knot series, which reimagined the Queen as an amateur sleuth, but Bennett would be the first to admit that she was writing entertainment, rather than attempting to penetrate the monarch’s inner psyche. Even as one idly wonders what an Kazuo Ishiguro or a Hilary Mantel-or even, more mischievously given his treatment of Thatcher, an Alan Hollinghurst-could do with such material, there has been a general unwillingness to explore the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth in any detail. But there has never been a serious attempt by a major literary novelist to get to grips with what it must be like, from a psychological and social perspective, to be the monarch.
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