LONDON —
Hilary Mantel, whose death was announced on
Friday, communed with ghosts throughout her life: the ghosts from history that
stalked her fiction, the ghosts of her Irish Catholic ancestors and the ghosts
of her unborn children.
اضافة اعلان
The British author’s accomplishments, however, were
very real.
There were midnight lines outside bookshops for her
last novel, the conclusion to her trilogy about the tumultuous life of Thomas
Cromwell, the scheming chief minister to King Henry VIII.
Mantel, who was 70, became the first British writer,
and first woman, to win the prestigious
Booker Prize twice with the first two
novels in the series, “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies”.
The third, “The Mirror & the Light”, was tipped
by many critics to make an unprecedented treble but missed out. Mantel took the
judges’ snub in good grace.
“I think a book is born into a cultural moment and
any book is carried on the cultural tide, so we just have to acknowledge that,”
she told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2020.
Mantel herself swam against the tide since
publishing her first novel in 1985, “Every Day Is Mother’s Day”, a darkly comic
story about a mentally disabled girl and her terrifying mother, who communes
with the undead.
It drew on Mantel’s post-university stint as a
social worker but was not the first novel she had written.
That manuscript was drafted in the 1970s but only
emerged in 1992 as “A Place of Greater Safety”, set in the years leading up to
the French Revolution of 1789, and its blood-soaked aftermath.
Much of her literary oeuvre dwelt on the historical
or the supernatural. But Mantel did not shy away from attacking contemporary
issues, including the British royalty and former prime ministers Margaret
Thatcher and Boris Johnson.
Interviewed by Italian newspaper La Repubblica in
September 2021, Mantel said she planned to take up Irish citizenship, “to
become a European again” after Brexit.
‘Female, northern, and poor’
Born as Hilary Thompson into
a family of Irish descent, Mantel grew up in the austere 1950s bearing the
three disadvantages of being “female, northern and poor”, as recounted in her
2003 memoir “Giving Up the Ghost”.
The book describes a girl of otherworldly
imagination growing up in a Derbyshire mill village and schooled by doctrinaire
Catholic nuns.
The writer described losing her own faith by the age
of 11, when she saw her father for the last time.
By then, her mother’s lover had been sharing the
family home for four years, along with her father. Mantel was the surname of
the new “stepfather”, although he and her mother never married.
Hilary Mantel went on to study law at the
London School of Economics but transferred in 1971 to Sheffield University to be
nearer her fiance Gerald McEwen, who was studying geology in the limestone-rich
region.
In her memoir, she recalled that one of her tutors
at Sheffield “was a bored local solicitor who made it plain that he didn’t
think women had any place in his classroom”.
Misogyny was evident towards the end of her studies
when Mantel developed crippling pains in her abdomen and legs. Doctors
dismissed her as “hysterical, neurotic, difficult”, and placed her on mind-altering
drugs.
Global following
Years later, by now living
in Botswana where
McEwen had swapped limestone for diamond exploration, Mantel
found her symptoms laid out in a medical textbook and was finally able to get
doctors to take the condition seriously.
In London, over Christmas 1979, Mantel had surgery
for endometriosis, a disorder in the blood cells of the uterus.
The procedure left her infertile and hormone
treatment led to rapid weight gain, twin traumas she describes in harrowing
detail in the memoir.
She imagines life with the daughter she would never
have, named Catriona, the most heart-rending ghost of the many specters that
populate her 12 novels.
Mantel and McEwen divorced in 1980 but remarried two
years later and relocated to Saudi Arabia for his geology work.
A later short story evoked a miserable time, as an
expatriate wife enduring cloistered life in the conservative Islamic state.
Liberated from that experience, she wrote in her
memoir of being on a quest to unearth the truth “in the accumulation of dusty
and broken facts, in the cellars and sewers of the human mind”.
Mantel’s quest continued, with the accumulation of tangible
awards and a global readership. The Wolf Hall Trilogy has so far been
translated into 41 languages, with sales of more than five million.
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