Hilary Mantel was for many years a contributing editor of the London Review of Books and for this weekend (only, one should say, and it is now almost gone) her many essays, reviews, stories, etc. are freely available. For those without a subscription, a collection of her work in the LRB titled Mantel Pieces: ‘Royal Bodies’ and Other Writing for the London Review of Books was published in 2020 – and mentioned by me here.
A statement from her publisher is here. And from her friend to whom she dedicated her Wolf Hall series, Mary Robertson, at The Huntington Library here.
Many sincere tributes written for The Guardian can be accessed here. The New York Times (subscription mostly required) obituary is here, also “What to Read by (and About) Hilary Mantel” . And today, an opinion piece from Kamila Shamsie in which she relates an anecdote of a meeting with Mantel at a dinner party (they share agents) not long before the publication of Wolf Hall; encapsulating some of my own thoughts on the extraordinary narrative voice that Mantel created:
[…] It was as though she’d been present and was relating, full of delight, a piece of slightly scurrilous gossip that she overheard while pouring wine, unseen, into Wolsey’s cup.
I told Hilary someone needed to record an audio guide to Tudor London, narrated by her, that visitors could listen to while walking past locations of significance. It was a mark of her graciousness that she looked amused though I’d reduced her to the role of tour guide instead of recognizing that she had a different way of entering King Henry VIII’s England than anyone else who’d ever written about it. When I started to read “Wolf Hall” a few months later I recognized instantly the narrative voice though I had never before seen it on the page: It peers over Cromwell’s shoulder, unseen, before entering his mind.
Kamila Shamsie “Hilary Mantel Was the Magician and the Spell” in The New York Times Sept. 24 2022.
Shamsie goes on to say: ” […Hilary Mantel] embodies both the magician and the spell, and part of the particular wonder of reading her is the knowledge that no one else has ever written like that before nor will again. She seemed to see so clearly the things — the past, the spirit world, the intricate relationship between the self and power — the rest of us saw through gauze or not at all”. I love that: ‘both the magician and the spell’! Interestingly, Shamsie says that upon hearing of Mantel’s death she returned to the memoir piece “Someone to Disturb”, read by me just a short time ago as “Sorry to Disturb”, marveling again at the strange disquiet, inconsistencies – internal and external to herself – that Mantel could identify and render so wonderfully in her writing.
Again, I say: A great, great loss.
Wednesday 28th September 2022: A tribute from Hilary Mantel’s friend to whom she dedicated her Wolf Hall series, Mary Robertson, from The Huntington Library in California where Mantel’s papers are being collected.
Saturday 1st October 2022: Just how great a loss can be most realized only in reading Mantel’s work but she was unafraid to enter the public fray, and the depth of her intellect and humanity is apparent in her wonderful Reith Lectures series for the BBC in 2017 – available here.