Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mary Mantel was born on July 6, 1952, in Glossop, Derbyshire, England, and grew up in a working-class Catholic family in the village of Hadfield. Her childhood was marked by early precocity — she learned to read at age three — and by the upheaval of her parents’ separation, her mother’s new relationship with Jack Mantel (whose name Hilary took), and the family’s move to Cheshire. She studied law at the London School of Economics, then at the University of Sheffield, and worked briefly as a social worker before devoting herself entirely to writing. Her early adult years were marked by chronic ill health: she suffered from undiagnosed endometriosis for years before receiving a correct diagnosis, and the condition, and its surgical treatment, left her infertile and changed her body in ways she wrote about with characteristic courage in her memoir Giving Up the Ghost (2003).
Mantel began publishing fiction in 1985 with Every Day Is Mother’s Day, and over the following two decades produced a series of distinguished novels ranging from Victorian social satire to supernatural horror to a searching historical novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety (1992), which she had actually written first but struggled to publish. She also wrote Fludd (1989), a darkly comic novel about a mysterious figure in a northern English village, and An Experiment in Love (1995), drawing on her own Catholic girlhood. Her eighth novel, Beyond Black (2005), about a medium haunted by genuine malevolent spirits, demonstrated her mastery of the uncanny.
Wolf Hall (2009), the first volume of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, won the Booker Prize and transformed Mantel’s career and reputation. A historical novel set in the court of Henry VIII, it follows Thomas Cromwell — lawyer’s son, exile, self-made man — from the fall of Cardinal Wolsey to the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn, as told from Cromwell’s perspicacious, pragmatic, acutely observant point of view. Mantel’s formal innovation — using the present tense and the pronoun “he” to designate Cromwell, so that the reader inhabits his consciousness moment by moment — produced a historical novel of a new kind: not a costume drama but a genuine encounter with the texture of sixteenth-century political life. The sequel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012), won both the Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award, making Mantel the first author to win the Booker Prize twice for works in the same sequence. The trilogy concluded with The Mirror and the Light (2020).
Mantel’s prose is one of the great achievements in contemporary English fiction: precise, economical, charged with irony, and capable of sudden lyrical elevation. She brought to historical fiction the sensibility of a novelist who understood power — its psychology, its strategies, its costs — from the inside, and her Cromwell is one of the most fully realized characters in recent English literature. She was also an outstanding critic and essayist, and her reviews and literary journalism in the London Review of Books and elsewhere were prized for their acuity.
Hilary Mantel died unexpectedly on September 22, 2022, in Exeter, Devon, aged seventy. She was created Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2014. Her death was mourned as the loss of one of the supreme English novelists of her era, and the Thomas Cromwell trilogy stands as her monument: a work that permanently expanded the possibilities of historical fiction in English and created a protagonist who will endure as long as the form itself.
