The terribly early death of Hilary Mantel at 70 robs the British
cultural scene of a huge shining light perhaps at the zenith of her
formidable powers. Born in Derbyshire and brought up as a Roman
Catholic, Mantel had lost her father by the age of 11, and her faith by the age of 12; she discussed
her religious views in her 2003 memoir,
Giving Up The Ghost,
claiming religion had left a permanent mark on her.
...the
real cliché, the sense of guilt. You grow up believing you are wrong
and bad. And for me, because I took what I was told really seriously,
it bred a very intense habit of introspection and self-examination
and a terrible severity with myself. So that nothing was ever good
enough. It’s like installing a policeman, and one moreover, who
keeps changing the law. “
In a 2013 interview with The Telegraph, Mantel
said, “I think that
nowadays the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable
people. ….. When I was a child, I wondered why priests and nuns were
not nicer people. I thought that they were amongst the worst people I
knew.”
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| Hilary at 9 |
Mantel also partly attributed to the early
onslaught from religion, her preoccupation with unseen reality; she
never questioned the existence of ‘the
next world’. When she
was tiny, she lived with her grandmother whose sister lived next-door
and whose nephew lived nearby in his deceased parents’ house and
every day her grandmother and sister would sit by the fire like
bookends, and gossip about the living and the dead with no
distinction made
between the two. The small Hilary listened and absorbed. “So, although I knew Martin and Harriet were dead, I felt as if they were
barely dead.” "Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past and I felt a very intimate connection with it."
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| Gerald MacEwen with Hilary |
During her twenties, Mantel
suffered a debilitating and serious illness. Initially diagnosed as a
psychiatric sickness, she was hospitalised and treated with
antipsychotic drugs which caused her huge suffering and deterred her
for several years from seeking medical help. Finally, when living in
Botswana in her twenties, she pored over medical textbooks and diagnosed that she was
probably suffering from a form of endometriosis,
which was eventually
confirmed in London and which, at that time, was treated by surgery,
which she endured, and
which caused her a surgical menopause at 27 years of age. Thus, children were never an option.
Endometriosis can be described as menstruation run amok. The cells in
the lining of the womb that usually bleed during a period, instead
grow in other parts of the body – the pelvis, the bladder, the
bowel- and bleed there causing huge pain and leaving scar tissue.
The distress from the
endometriosis caused her and her husband, Gerald MacEwen, married in 1973, to divorce
in 1981 though they remarried less than two years later. He eventually gave up his career as a geologist to become Mantel's business manager.
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| A younger Thomas Cromwell |
Once her true condition was known,
Hilary was put on medication which caused her hitherto slight figure
to balloon permanently, and she suffered for the rest of her life from
the attitudes and cliches associated with overweight people whom everyone knows “are
lazy, undisciplined slobs”
as she noted drily. And this illness and its consequences, remained both the curse of Mantel’s life and also the one she
worked into the very being of her art. “Her
magnum opus is made of blood and female bodies.” Her
magnum opus is the Wolf Hall trilogy and Thomas Cromwell, its hero
and villain, a giant character in life and literature, had “a
certain attentiveness to the female condition”. He
visits, and pities, Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s Queen of over
twenty years, who never gave birth [as required] to a son who lived, and thus who failed in her royal reproductive duties, and was consequently,
confined to a distant
castle, replaced by a younger fertile Anne Boleyn. Catherine
gradually succumbs to an internal cancer, rotting from inside the abdomen
while Anne meanwhile, destroyed by Cromwell, after producing only a
daughter, loses a son by miscarriage which Mantel
portrays as trailing
blood on the palace floor.
 |
Anne Boleyn. Used flirtation, faith and fertility to catch the King |
In
her first two Wolf Hall books, Mantel invents a Cromwell who is
courteous, even tender at
times, rather belying his
early brutal life as a street urchin with a violent father. He is
usually logical, rational, but doing his best to serve an irrational,
narcissistic,
regal ego. He wants to live, after all. However, in the first two
sentences of The Mirror and The Light,
Mantel has Cromwell walking away from the decapitation of Anne Boleyn
and wondering idly about
a second breakfast. He is
hugely powerful, having engineered Anne’s death, watched the
head fall and the blood
flow, but he
is also so supremely confident and bien dans sa peau, to consider the
treat for himself of a second breakfast as
he leaves the execution site.
Mantel thus sets
the scene for his final chapter and the third book, demonstrating her skill in two lines!
Her
preoccupation with death and the next world appears in others of
Mantel’s book. For instance, in The Giant, O’Brien, Mantel explores and contrasts the lives of two real-life 18th century figures, a freakishly tall Irish sideshow performer, O'Brien, and a Scottish scientist, Dr. Hunter, who is preoccupied with what happens at the moment of death;
he is frustrated because he doesn’t know where the dead have gone
nor how he can get them back. He was interested in resuscitation after apparent death and in suicides who
sought death in the Thames.
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| Thomas Cromwell, all powerful statesman. |
Mantel’s research was legendary;
she took over ten years seeking facts and feelings in the mediaeval
world and beyond,
for the first of her Wolf Hall trilogy, for example. She sought, not to imagine
her characters, but to see them, almost
to inhabit them, and Larissa
MacFarquhar in the
New Yorker
pictures the indefatigable Hilary after
her death, in the next
world, busily
finding and questioning the historical figures about whom she has
written, to finally discover
what actually happened at
critical moments. She suggests that
we readers can boast
to those born in the future that we were alive at the time of Hilary
Mantel! Larissa also suggests that if Britain were as grateful for
her as it ought to be, there would be another funeral as magnificent
as the one for the Queen, strangely,
a sentiment I expressed to someone the day of Hilary’s death.
However, there has been
genuine, widespread,
world-wide mourning online, on air and in print, expressing strong
feelings of incalculable loss over the
premature departure of this
extraordinarily talented writer.
“There are not many writers
who, like prophets, seize, melt down and reshape the archetypal
stories of their people.” [ MacFarquhar. Sept 24, 2022. New
Yorker.]
 |
After receiving an honorary degree from University College, Dublin. 2016. |
AWARDS
1987 The Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize
for an article on Jeddah.
1989 The Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize
for Fludd.
1989 The Cheltenham Prize
for Fludd.
1989 The Southern Arts Literature Prize for
Fludd.
1992 The Sunday Express Book of The Year for
A Place of Greater Safety.
1994 The Sunday Express Book of The Year for
A Change of Climate.
1995 The Sunday Express Book of The Year for
An Experiment in Love.
1996 The Hawthornden Prize for
The Giant, O’Brien.
2006 Short-listed for Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
for Beyond Black.
2009 The Man Booker Prize for Fiction for
Wolf Hall.
2009 Short-listed for the 2009 Costa Novel Award for Wolf Hall.
2010 The Inaugural Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction for
Wolf Hall.
2010 Short-listed
for the Orange Prize for Fiction for
Wolf Hall
2012 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for
Bring Up The Bodies.
2020 Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for
The Mirror and The Light.
2021 The Walter Scott Prize for The Mirror and The Light.
REWARDS
2006 Awarded a C.B.E.
2013 Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies were both adapted for the stage and performed
by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon.
2014 Both plays transferred to the Aldwych in the West End after which they moved to Broadway.
2014 Awarded a D.B.E. becoming Dame Hilary.
2015 Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, adapted into a six-part mini-series on BBC 2.
"The things you think are the disasters in your life, are not disasters really.
Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch,
a path, if only you can see it."
"I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered, stony-faced into
middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag, just in case."