I first read Hilary Mantel the summer I turned 17. I was going into my final year at school, and our history teacher told us to read A Place of Greater Safety as preparation for studying the French Revolution. The book was 900 pages with a dull brown cover – not an enticing prospect. But I dutifully began it on the long drive down to Rosslare, and within a few pages was spellbound, reading on the overnight ferry across to Cherbourg, then the whole length of France to the Dordogne.
I remember very little about that French holiday of my own, so entirely did I spend it in Mantel’s world. Even now, I remember the way Camille Desmoulins kisses Lucile Duplessis’s hand (“He turned it over rather forcefully, and held her palm against his mouth. And just that; he didn’t kiss it, just held it there. She shivered”) and a year later, I went out with a boy for months because he reminded me of the way she described Camille.
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The way the story is told – the shifting tenses, shifting pronouns, blurring boundaries, sudden intimacies – seemed to capture not just the spirit of the times, but something of the intensity of being a teenager, too – or maybe just of being alive. I felt so alive reading that book that I fought with my sister, who wanted us to go out and celebrate Bastille Day with some actual boys we’d met, and with my mum, who thought it was unnatural for me to want to stay in and read the entire time.
I would go on to read everything Mantel wrote – any interview she gave. There is no writer I would rather read on writing. There is no writer I quote more frequently, talking to students, or about my own writing. At a conference on historical fiction at Queen’s University, Belfast, just last week, writer Nuala O’Connor and I broke off from our panel discussion laughing at the number of times we had invoked or quoted or deferred to Mantel.
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Sharp and pragmatic, never sentimental, she is nevertheless acutely attuned to the mysteries of writing, to the strange realms and dramas of the psyche. Her essays are as intoxicating as her fiction – whether on starving teenage girls and saints, or royalty, or on meeting the devil.
It will be a lifelong regret that I never met her.
One of the greatest joys of my own writing life was receiving an email from Hilary Mantel, out of the blue, about my own historical novel, These Days. Even better was the excuse to write back to her and to tell her how much her work meant to me – how long and deeply I’d loved it. I shouldn’t have needed a reason to write to an author who’d been so important to me, or whose work mattered so, and I’m just glad I did it in time. She was as warm in her emails as she was generous, and she signed them, “Love Hilary”.
*This article has been corrected and updated after Lucy’s mother reminded her (as mothers are wont to do, that the family sailed directly to France, not via Larne-Stranraer and Dover-Calais). Lucy adds: In her Paris Review interview, Mantel says, “In A Place of Greater Safety, Camille Desmoulins wonders why he was always running into Antoine Saint-Just. We must be some sort of cousins because I always see him at christenings, he says. It’s now become a “fact” that they were cousins. Things get passed around so easily on the Internet. And fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes fact, without anyone stepping in to arbitrate and say, What are your sources?” In this spirit, in the spirit of Mantel’s being, rightly, such a stickler for historical fact, and in the spirit too of her Irish connections, a journey relocated from England to its rightful place in Ireland seems the correct thing to do.
