The publication, in 2009, of “ Wolf Hall,” whose protagonist was Henry VIII’s brilliant consigliere, Thomas Cromwell, and of its sequel, “ Bring Up the Bodies,” in 2012-a series that, with the release this week of “ The Mirror and the Light” (Henry Holt), has become a trilogy-has brought Mantel a degree of popular success that is rare for authors of serious literary fiction. But she achieved celebrity only after she committed herself to the genre and the period that she pokes fun at in that scene on the train.

From 1985, when she published her first book, until about ten years ago, Mantel earned admiration for a string of strikingly idiosyncratic works of fiction, most of them about modern people in contemporary settings, and for her numerous essays and reviews in publications like The New York Review of Books. But it’s hard, now, not to read the “Wyfe to Crookback” episode as being prophetic. Getting the past right-or wrong-has always been a theme in Mantel’s fiction, much of which features characters who, like Emma and Ginny, struggle to come to terms with histories they’d rather not talk about. It’s clearly a work of historical fiction, the archly period title, “Wyfe to Crookback,” traced in “florid gold script.” (The “wyfe” in question is Anne Neville, unhappy queen to the legendarily hunchbacked Richard III.) Although the woman, Emma, is a physician, she evidently knows a thing or two about late-Plantagenet domestic architecture as she examines the cover art, she notes that the manor house behind the heroine (“a svelte woman, with a small crown perched upon her wimple”) has “anachronistic chimney stacks.” The vulgar font, the clueless art work, even the “fat” paperback’s size, with its intimation of a future at the beach: all this is meant to indict the middlebrow taste of Emma’s fellow-passenger, Ginny, a posh neighbor who happens to be the wyfe of Emma’s lover.

In the opening pages of Hilary Mantel’s 1994 novel, “ A Change of Climate,” a woman in a railway carriage stares disapprovingly at the cover of the cheesy paperback her travelling companion is reading.

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