Hilary Mantel obituary: prizewinning author who brought history alive in her novels

Born: July 6th, 1952

Died: September 22nd, 2022

Hilary Mantel, one of Britain’s most decorated novelists, whose trilogy of books on the life of Thomas Cromwell — Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light — received critical acclaim and commercial success, landing on best-seller lists around the world, died on September 22nd at a hospital in Exeter, England. She was 70.

Mantel, the author of 17 books, twice won Britain’s Booker Prize for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both of which sold millions of copies. She was longlisted for the same prize, for The Mirror and the Light, in 2020. The novels led to popular stage and screen adaptations.

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But it was a long and arduous road to reach those heights, beginning with a tough childhood. “I was unsuited to being a child,” Mantel wrote in a 2003 memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. She endured numerous health problems, leading one doctor to call her “Little Miss Neverwell”. The doctor was the first of many to fail to properly treat her.

Her illnesses later proved so debilitating that she could not hold down regular jobs, steering her to writing. But even then it was a writer’s life of fits and starts. Mainstream success did not come to her until she was well into her 50s.

Her Cromwell books were the turning point. Enraptured critics said she had presented the historical novel as high literature, portraying her subjects not as cardboard characters from centuries past but as real people of contradictions and psychological complexity, relatable in any age. And readers were carried along by her storytelling power.

Mantel was born Hilary Mary Thompson on July 6th, 1952, to Henry and Margaret Thompson in Glossop, a village in Derbyshire, and grew up in an Irish Catholic family. She said she was strongly influenced by her Irish ancestry. “My parents were both born in England, but the generation that shaped me was the one before that, and I was conscious of belonging to an Irish family,” she said. “We were northern, working-class and Catholic, and to me, Englishness was Protestant and southern, and owned by people with more money.”

Her mother was a school secretary. When her mother left her husband and moved the family in with Jack Mantel, an engineer, Hilary took her stepfather’s surname.

At 18 she moved to London to study law at the London School of Economics but she could not afford to finish her training. After marrying Gerald McEwen, a geologist, she became a teacher and started writing on the side.

Mantel did not achieve mainstream recognition until 2009 with Wolf Hall, the first in her trilogy about Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who became one of Henry VIII’s most trusted assistants

In her 20s Mantel was diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition in which tissue similar to that lining the womb grows elsewhere. Around that time, a doctor ordered her to stop writing. Her response, described in her memoir, was typically forthright: “I said to myself, ‘If I think of another story, I will write it.’”

At 27 she had 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 that Mantel later drew on in her novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, about a British woman living in Jeddah.

She finished her first novel, A Place of Greater Safety, set in the French Revolution, in 1979. It was initially rejected by publishers — she was unknown, and the book, a historical novel, was more than 700 pages. But her second book, a contemporary novel published in 1985, became a critical success, and over the next decades she developed a following.

Yet Mantel did not achieve mainstream recognition until 2009 with Wolf Hall, the first in her trilogy about Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who became one of Henry VIII’s most trusted assistants. That novel began with a shocking scene: a teenage Cromwell lying in a pool of his own vomit, having been beaten by his father. Cromwell soon decides to make a different life for himself and embarks on a path to power.

In a 2020 interview with the New York Times, Mantel said she had become fascinated with Cromwell after learning in high school about his role in dissolving Britain’s monasteries on the order of Henry VIII. Yet when reading novels about him, she saw that he was presented as an odious stereotype. “I realised that some imaginative work is due on this man,” she said.

The trilogy was translated into 41 languages and sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. It also helped rehabilitate Cromwell’s image by presenting him as a brilliant and revolutionary strategist

Cromwell became the dominant figure in her trilogy, which followed him as he transformed himself into one of the most powerful figures in Britain, only to lose the king’s favour — and his head. “I’m not going to meet another Thomas Cromwell, if you think how long he’s been around in my consciousness,” Mantel said in the 2020 interview.

She 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 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 in the production. (Mark Rylance played him in the BBC series.)

The trilogy was translated into 41 languages and sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. It also helped rehabilitate Cromwell’s image by presenting him as a brilliant and revolutionary strategist.

“Hilary has reset the historical patterns,” Diarmaid MacCulloch, an Oxford theology professor and historian and the author of a Cromwell biography, told the New York Times in 2020.

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, where she and her husband mostly kept to themselves as she focused on her writing. Earlier this year they were making plans to move to west Cork. Last year she told Italian newspaper La Repubblica that she hoped to gain Irish citizenship and become “a European again”. She said the popularity of the monarchy “baffles” her.

She could be sharp-witted and iconoclastic in her views and didn’t fear stirring controversy with her irreverent attitude toward British politics and royalty. She was attacked by the tabloids for remarks she made during a lecture at the British Museum in 2013, when she compared Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, to “a shop-window mannequin” with no personality. She drew the ire of conservative British politicians over a short story she wrote that imagined a planned assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

Still, despite her scepticism of pomp and the political establishment, she was a national icon. 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. The couple did not have any children. she is also survived by a younger brother, Brian Mantel, a management consultant.

After completing the Cromwell trilogy, Mantel described the process as “absolutely gruelling” and said she didn’t feel she had the stamina to undertake another big historical fiction project. Instead, she planned to focus on a new medium — plays.

Bill Hamilton, her long-time literary agent, said that at her death Mantel was working on at least one play and had various works in different stages of completion, but that there was “no novel or nonfiction book that could ever be published”.

“It’s highly unlikely that anything left incomplete would see the light of day,” he said in an email.

In one of her final interviews, published September 10th in the Financial Times, Mantel was asked if she believed in an afterlife. She did, she said, although she couldn’t imagine how it might work. “However,” she added, “the universe is not limited by what I can imagine.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.