& with regret …
An abiding regret for the space left in my literary life with Hilary Mantel’s death; all those bodies and ghosts – royal and heavenly, and not – silenced. Now, just over a year later, today is published in the UK a collection of her essays, exquisitely – albeit misleadingly – titled A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing (pub. John Murray). Pulled together by her former editor (at Fourth Estate and now at John Murray), Nicholas Pearson, are pieces from Mantel’s long writing career – on many subjects and from the many stations of her personal and professional life. It is not, then, a memoir in the usual sense, rather I read somewhere it described as a ‘memoir of the mind’ – and what a singularly brilliant mind it was. Perhaps this book will go a little way to fill that space that I still feel.
As her unpublished work and diaries are being deposited with her other papers at The Huntington Library in California and sealed until her husband’s death, for some, this collection is perhaps the last opportunity to wonder at Mantel’s gifts.
In April, a memorial service was held at Southwark Cathedral, around about which time it was revealed that, at the time of her death, Hilary Mantel had been working on an adaption – mash-up of sorts – of Pride and Prejudice, told from the perspective of the over-looked Bennett sister, Mary (the ‘plain Jane’ middle one), and tentatively or maybe definitely titled: ‘Provocation’. Lordy! Pride, prejudice AND ‘provocation’! Jane and Hilary in conversation (and now in heavenly union)! Regency England given the Tudor treatment – what a treat that would have been.
Here is The Guardian magazine piece that ends with the extract provided by Mantel’s widower, Gerald McEwen, and which was read at the memorial service. (What a divine thought: Darcy is not the brightest!) There are interesting reflections from McEwen and others, and I was reminded of Mantel’s Reith Lecture in which she said: “the dead are invisible, they are not absent”. I didn’t remember that to be a quote from Saint Augustine (looking back, those were indeed the first words of her first lecture), but it does then seem appropriate that her memorial service was held in Southwark with its ancient Augustinian tradition.
As I say, there can only be regret.