Dame Hilary Mantel DBE FRSL, the Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall, died on the 23rd of September aged 70.
Her publishing house, HarperCollins, stated that Dame Hilary died surrounded by her family and friends following a sudden stroke. Tributes have been made to Mantel by the First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon, fellow novelist Bernadine Evaristo, and historian Lucy Worsley, among others.
Hilary Mantel was born in Derbyshire in 1952 to parents of Irish descent. She was raised Catholic, but would later go on to criticise the Catholic Church in her works and in interviews.
Mantel studied at the London School of Economics before transferring to Sheffield University. After graduating with a Bachelor of Jurisprudence, Mantel became a social worker, and then a sales assistant.
In 1973 she married geologist Gerald McEwen. The pair divorced in 1981, but remarried in 1982. They lived in Botswana for five years, then Saudi Arabia for four years, before returning to the UK.
Hilary Mantel’s literary career spanned over three decades, starting in 1985 with the publication of her first novel, Every Day is Mother’s Day. Mantel wrote seventeen books during her lifetime, including two short story collections and a memoir. The latter, Giving Up the Ghost, won the Mind “Book of the Year” Award in 2003 for its discussion of physical illness, grief, and religion.
Mantel was also an essayist and reviewer, starting in 1987 with her role as a film critic for The Spectator. Other publications that Mantel wrote for include The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books.
One of her articles for The Guardian details her struggles with endometriosis. Initially misdiagnosed, Mantel’s endometriosis would eventually leave her unable to have children. She required treatment all her life, and became a patron for the Endometriosis SHE Trust due to her experiences with the condition.
Many of Mantel’s works draw heavily on her own life. Her novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street concerns an Englishwoman moving to Saudi Arabia, an obvious parallel, whilst the historical novel Fludd is about the Roman Catholic Church. She also made much literary use of the political climate around her, with Margaret Thatcher appearing briefly in An Experiment in Love and then once again in one of her short story collections, morbidly entitled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.
The latter title, as expected, raised more than a few eyebrows. She was not a stranger to controversy, publicly discussing opinions on such volatile subjects as the monarchy and the Catholic Church, with some frequency and much eloquence.
Her preoccupation with the themes of religion, politics, and history would continue to act as a throughline across her works, and would go on to define her Wolf Hall trilogy.
Wolf Hall, published in 2009, concerns Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in the court of Henry VIII. Thrilling, contemplative, and laden with historically-accurate detail, Wolf Hall is a masterwork of contemporary literature. It won multiple prizes, including the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.
Mantel would go on to win the Man Booker Prize yet again for Bring Up the Bodies, the 2012 sequel to Wolf Hall, making her the first woman and first British author to do so twice. Bring Up the Bodies also won the Costa Book of the Year award. The book concerns the fall of Anne Boleyn, and is equally disturbing and compelling in its presentation of events.
The final novel in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, was published in 2020. It follows Thomas Cromwell’s descent, and ends with his execution. It won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
The first two novels were adapted into an RSC stage play starring Ben Miles in 2014, with the adaptation of the final novel following in 2021. A BBC television mini series starring Mark Rylance aired in 2015, with a second series confirmed but as yet undated.
Mantel, an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1990, was awarded a damehood for services to literature in 2014.
The literary legacy that she leaves behind is a tangible one, bolstered by book sales and award nominations, pitted with the controversy that came with unashamedly speaking her mind, but forged by the very real resonance of her works.
Her writing is expressive, moving you to laughter as easily as to tears; immersive in its portrayal of the past and the characters that inhabit it; perceptive, in how she tells difficult truths with unflinching clarity.
“Can you make a new England?” Mantel asks in The Mirror and the Light. “You can write a new story”, she offers as an answer.
“You can write on England, but what was written before keeps showing through, inscribed on the rocks and carried on floodwater, surfacing from deep cold wells”.
It is likely that Mantel’s works will continue to show through the works of others in a similar way. Her influence may be carried through the bestseller charts, her style may surface somewhere in the work of a new, upcoming novelist.
It is impossible to tell just how wide her reach will prove to be, or how many future Booker Prize winners will have been shaped by her writing. What is certain is that her works will remain a cornerstone of contemporary English literature for many years to come.
Words by Briony Havergill
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