San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
British author earned praise, prizes for historical fiction
HILARY MANTEL 1952-2022
Hilary Mantel, the British author of “Wolf Hall,” “Bring Up the Bodies” and “The Mirror and the Light,” her trilogy based on the life of Thomas Cromwell, died Thursday at a hospital in Exeter, England. She was 70.
Her death, days after a stroke Monday, was confirmed by Bill Hamilton, her longtime literary agent.
Mantel, the author of 17 books, was one of Britain’s most decorated novelists. She had twice won the Booker Prize, the country’s prestigious literary award, for “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” both of which went on to sell millions of copies.
Parul Sehgal, a former book critic for the New York Times, wrote in a 2020 review of “The Mirror and the Light” that Mantel’s writing envelops the reader “in the sweep of a story rich with conquest, conspiracy and mazy human psychology.”
Mantel was not just a writer of historical fiction, Sehgal said, but an expert in showing “what power reveals and conceals in human character.”
Mantel was born Hilary Mary Thompson on July 6, 1952, to Henry and Margaret Thompson in Glossop, a village in Derbyshire, and she grew up in a busy Irish Catholic family. After her mother left her husband and moved the family in with Jack Mantel, an engineer, Mantel took her stepfather’s
surname.
At 18, she moved to London to study law at the London School of Economics but could not afford to finish her training. After marrying Gerald McEwen, a geologist, she became a teacher and started writing on the side.
In her 20s, she realized she was suffering from endometriosis, a condition in which tissue similar to that lining the womb grows elsewhere.
At 27, having had the endometriosis diagnosis confirmed, she had a surgery to remove her uterus and ovaries, although that did not stop the pain. The complications from her illness made a normal day job impossible, she said.
“It narrowed my options in life,” she said, “and it narrowed them to writing.”
The couple went to live in Botswana and Saudi Arabia, an experience Mantel later drew on in her novel “Eight Months on Ghazzah Street,” about a British woman living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
She finished her first novel, “A Place of Greater Safety,” set in the French Revolution, in 1979. It was initially rejected by publishers. But her second book, a contemporary novel published in 1985, became a critical success, and over the next decades she developed a cult following.
Yet Mantel did not achieve mainstream success until 2009, with “Wolf Hall,” the first in her trilogy of books about Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who ended up becoming one of Henry VIII’s most trusted assistants.
Mantel did not just reawaken readers to Cromwell’s life in her novels; she also helped bring him to the stage in a series of award-winning plays and also a BBC TV series. She co-wrote the stage adaptation of the final book in the trilogy, “The Mirror and the Light,” with Ben Miles, the actor who played Cromwell.
The trilogy was translated into 41 languages and sold more than 5 million copies worldwide.
Even after she rose to prominence, Mantel never became a fixture in London’s literary scene. She led a quiet life in Budleigh Salterton, a village on the coast of Devon.
In 2015, Prince Charles anointed Mantel with the title of Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, the equivalent of knighthood.
Mantel is survived by her husband, McEwen, Hamilton said. The couple did not have any children. She is also survived by a younger brother, Brian Mantel, a management consultant, Hamilton added.