Wolf Hall writer: There is racism in Meghan criticism
Racism has played a part in the criticism aimed at the Duchess of Sussex, Dame Hilary Mantel claimed last night.
the author, 67, said that while Meghan had faced scrutiny since her marriage to Prince Harry ‘I hesitate to call her a victim’.
Dame Hilary, who won the Booker Prize for her historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, added: ‘But I think there has been an element of racism in the invective against her. I think it’s more deeply embedded in people’s consciousness that any of us are willing to admit.’
In an interview with the BBC, she said: ‘there’s an intense concentration on the bodies of royal women. If anyone doubts that, we only have to look at what happens when our royal ladies are pregnant and when they give birth. they are perceived as public property in the same way that tudor women were perceived.’
Harry and Meghan rocked the royal Family in January when they announced they would step down as senior royals, less than two years after their marriage. they intend to split their time between the UK and Canada.
Dame Hilary, speaking ahead of the publication of the third instalment of her tudor trilogy, the Mirror & the Light, for which she hopes to receive an unprecedented third Booker Prize, compared scrutiny of the duchess to that faced by royal women in the 16th century.
But in Meghan’s case that included her skin colour, she added. the treatment of royal women was ‘sad’ and ‘objectionable’, she said, because ‘it is simply turning the individual woman back into a breeder’. Asked about the duchess, she said that scrutiny of royal bodies ‘does include the skin’.
In 2016, Prince Harry said media coverage of Meghan had ‘racial undertones’ and novelist Sir Philip Pullman has claimed Meghan ‘is attacked by the British press because she’s black’.
In 2013 Dame Hilary came under fire for likening the Duchess of Cambridge to a ‘shop window mannequin’ who would become a ‘jointed doll on which certain rags are hung’.
the comments were condemned by then prime minister David Cameron as ‘completely misguided’.