Hilary Mantel

Writer

• Born: July 6, 1952
• Place of Birth: Hadfield, Derbyshire, England
• Died: September 22, 2022
• Place of Death: Exeter, Devon, England

Biography

Hilary Mary Mantel was born on July 6, 1952, into a working-class Catholic family in the village of Hadfield, Derbyshire, near Manchester, England. She was the first of three children born to her father, a clerk, and her mother, who began working at the mills as a teenager. At the age of four, Hilary began to experience a series of illnesses (the local doctor disparagingly labeled her “Little Miss Neverwell”), and she grew up small and thin. When she was eight, her parents took in a boarder, Jack Mantel, an engineer, who became Hilary’s mother’s lover; her biological father continued to live separately under the same roof for several years, until the family moved to a nearby town, when he disappeared forever. The children were raised under Mantel’s name.

Mantel attended convent high school and in her late teens began experiencing strange, severe pains. Misdiagnosed by a succession of incompetent physicians as a psychosomatic sufferer, she was given a pharmacopeia of psychotropic drugs, which greatly affected her mental health. She attended the London School of Economics in 1970, and earned a law degree from the University of Sheffield in 1973.

Mantel married geologist Gerald McEwen at the age of twenty. The couple, following her husband’s profession, in 1977 moved to Botswana, where they lived for five years. Mantel meanwhile correctly diagnosed her ailment as endometriosis, a condition in which cells migrate from the uterus to other parts of the body. Rendered infertile, she endured a hysterectomy; her thyroid, affected by steroid treatments, caused her to gain weight. Mantel divorced her husband but remarried him, and they spent several years in Saudi Arabia, during which time she worked as a salesperson, as a social worker, and as an English teacher.

Mantel began writing seriously in her early twenties, and contributed stories and reviews to such periodicals as London Magazine, the London Review of Books, the Literary Review, and Encounter. She served as film critic for Spectator from 1987 to 1991. Her first full-length work, loosely based on her experiences as a social worker, Every Day Is Mother’s Day, was published in 1985. A sequel, Vacant Possessions, dealing with the same main characters ten years later, was released the following year. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is a searing indictment of religious fundamentalism, based on Mantel’s observations while living in Saudi Arabia.

Mantel’s subsequent works—often marked by original and poignant observations and wry humor—dealt with many subjects and earned her considerable literary acclaim. Fludd, set in a northern English mill town, won the Winifred Holthy Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize, and the Southern Arts Literature Prize. Her French Revolution epic, A Place of Greater Safety, won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. An Experiment in Love, concerning three female university students in the 1970s, won the Hawthornden Prize, and The Giant, O’Brien, detailing the life of an eighteenth-century man, won the Hawthornden again. Mantel’s additional works included Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir, Learning to Talk: Short Stories, and Beyond Black, the story of a psychic, which was short- listed for a Commonwealth Writers Prize and for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Mantel's most famous series began with the 2009 release of Wolf Hall, a novel about the life of Thomas Cromwell, an advisor to King Henry VIII. For both Wolf Hall and its 2012 sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel won the Man-Booker Prize. A television miniseries of the book was produced in 2015 by the BBC and Masterpiece. Both novels were also adapted into a two-part successful stage play produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2014 and running on Broadway in 2015. In 2014 Mantel published an acclaimed book of short stories, called The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Her Thomas Cromwell series ended with a third installment, The Mirror and the Light, published in 2020. Also selling well, the book was a Booker Prize finalist that inspired, with Mantel as a cowriter, its own Royal Shakespeare Company stage production that ran in London in 2021.

Mantel was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2006.

By 2022, Mantel had indicated a desire to shift her work more toward playwriting. However, following a stroke days earlier, she died in a hospital in Exeter, Devon, on September 22, 2022, at the age of seventy. Her work A Memoir of My Former Self was posthumously published in 2023.

Bibliography

Elmhirst, Sophie. “The Unquiet Mind of Hilary Mantel.” New Statesman. New Statesman, 3 Oct. 2012. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.

Mantel, Hilary. “Bring Up the Bodies: A Review and Interview with Booker Prize–Winning Author Hilary Mantel.” Interview by Ilana Teitelbaum. Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 9 May 2012. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.

Mantel, Hilary. "Hilary Mantel, Art of Fiction No. 226." Interview by Mona Simpson. Paris Review. Paris Review, Spring 2015. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.

MacFarquhar, Larissa. "The Dead Are Real." New Yorker. Condé Nast, 15 Oct. 2012. Web. Mar. 2016.

Marshall, Alex, and Alexandra Alter. "Hilary Mantel, Prize-Winning Author of Historical Fiction, Dies at 70." The New York Times, 23 Sept. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/books/hilary-mantel-dead.html. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Self, John. "A Memoir of my Former Self by Hillary Mantel Review." The Guardian, 14 Oct. 2023, www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/14/a-memoir-of-my-former-self-by-hilary-mantel-review-b-sides-and-rarities. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Teeman, Tim. "Hilary Mantel on Wolf Hall, Kate Middleton, and Plans for New Novels." Daily Beast. Daily Beast, 8 Apr. 2015. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.