Hilary Mary Thompson was born on the 6th of July 1952 in Glossop, Derbyshire, but the child who would become Dame Hilary Mantel effectively vanished from her own family history before she turned twelve. Her father, Henry Thompson, a clerk of Irish descent, was pushed out of the household when her mother's lover, Jack Mantel, moved in to share a bedroom with her mother. The family relocated to Romiley, Cheshire, to escape the gossip of their mill village, leaving Henry Thompson behind in the old house. Hilary never saw her father again, and four years later, she legally took the surname of the man who had become her unofficial stepfather. This early erasure of a parent and the subsequent adoption of a new identity forged a lifelong sensitivity to the ways history is rewritten and the personal is political. She grew up in a Roman Catholic household in a mill village, attending St. Charles Roman Catholic Primary School, but the domestic chaos of her childhood would later fuel a literary career defined by the margins of power and the voices of the forgotten.
The Body That Refused
During her twenties, Hilary Mantel suffered a debilitating and painful illness that doctors initially misdiagnosed as a psychiatric disorder. Hospitalized and treated with antipsychotic drugs that reportedly produced psychotic symptoms of their own, she spent years in a state of medical limbo before consulting a textbook in Botswana and realizing she was suffering from a severe form of endometriosis. The condition was confirmed by doctors in London, but the treatment required a surgical menopause at the age of twenty-seven, leaving her unable to have children and disrupting her life in ways that would become central to her writing. She later described the experience as a catastrophe that forced her to think her way through questions of fertility and what it means to be without children. This physical trauma became a thematic core of her work, where she explored the problematized woman's body and the pain that must be lived with rather than cured. Her use of autogenic training to manage the pain became a tool for survival, allowing her to transform personal suffering into the complex, often grotesque, emotional landscapes found in novels like Beyond Black and Wolf Hall.
The Writer In The Desert
In 1977, Mantel moved with her husband, geologist Gerald McEwen, to Botswana, where they lived for the next five years before spending four years in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The experience of leaving Jeddah felt like the happiest day of her life, a sentiment that would later inform her writing about the clash of values between Islamic culture and the liberal West in her novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. Her time abroad provided a unique vantage point on the tensions of the modern world, which she explored in her early novels and memoirs. After returning to England, she worked as a film critic for The Spectator from 1987 to 1991, a position that allowed her to hone her critical voice before turning her full attention to fiction. Her first novel, Every Day Is Mother's Day, was published in 1985, followed by a sequel, Vacant Possession, a year later. These early works laid the groundwork for a career that would eventually see her win the Booker Prize twice, but they were also the result of a life lived on the periphery, observing the world from the outside before she could finally write her way back in.
The publication of Wolf Hall in 2009 marked a seismic shift in British literature, transforming Hilary Mantel into a household name and securing her place as one of the most important writers of her generation. The novel, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, won that year's Booker Prize, with judges describing it as an extraordinary piece of storytelling. Mantel, who had been flying through the air upon hearing the news, said she would spend the prize money on sex and drugs and rock and roll. The book was the first favorite since 2002 to win the award, accounting for 45% of the sales of all the nominated books. Its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, published in May 2012, won the Costa Book of the Year and the 2012 Man Booker Prize, making Mantel the first British writer and the first woman to win the Booker Prize more than once. The trilogy, which includes The Mirror & the Light published in 2020, has sold more than 5 million copies, cementing Cromwell not just as a historical figure, but as a complex, modern protagonist whose struggles with power and identity resonate with contemporary audiences.
The Voice Of The Margins
Mantel's literary output extended far beyond the historical fiction that brought her fame, encompassing a wide range of genres and themes that reflected her own life and observations. Her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, published in 2003, won the MIND Book of the Year award and explored the intersection of memory and fiction, while her short story collection, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, included a controversial title story that sparked public debate and even calls for a police investigation. She wrote reviews and essays for The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books, often tackling subjects that challenged the status quo, from the role of royal women to the nature of Catholicism. Her novel Beyond Black, set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, featured a professional medium whose calm exterior concealed grotesque psychic damage, earning praise from novelist Pat Barker as the book that should have won the Booker Prize. These works demonstrated her ability to navigate the margins of society, giving voice to those who were often silenced or misunderstood, and establishing her as a writer who could move seamlessly between the personal and the political.
The Politics Of Power
Mantel's views on power and authority were as sharp and unyielding as her prose, often challenging the established order in ways that provoked public controversy. In a 2013 speech on media and royal women at the British Museum, she described Catherine Middleton, then the Duchess of Cambridge, as a personality-free shop window mannequin whose sole purpose was to deliver an heir to the throne, a comment that sparked substantial public debate and drew criticism from political leaders like Ed Miliband and David Cameron. Her essay Royal Bodies, published in the London Review of Books, argued that the phenomenon of monarchy was irrational and that cheerful curiosity could easily become cruelty. She also expressed her views on Catholicism, stating that the Church was not an institution for respectable people and that priests and nuns were among the worst people she knew as a child. These remarks, along with the themes explored in her earlier novel Fludd, led the Catholic bishop Mark O'Toole to comment that there was an anti-Catholic thread in her work, but Mantel remained unapologetic in her belief that writers should resist the urge to change their past words and that the truth, however uncomfortable, must be told.
The Final Chapter
Hilary Mantel died on the 22nd of September 2022, aged 70, at a hospital in Exeter from complications of a stroke that occurred three days earlier. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel characterized as a mash-up of Jane Austen novels, a project that would have continued her exploration of the intersection between history and fiction. Her legacy, however, was already secure, with a body of work that included twelve novels, two collections of short stories, a memoir, and numerous articles and opinion pieces. She was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2006 and elevated to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2014 for services to literature. Her influence extended beyond the page, as she delivered five Reith Lectures on BBC Radio Four in 2017, talking about the theme of historical fiction and the adaptation of historical novels for stage or screen. Mantel's life, from her early years in a mill village to her final days in Exeter, was a testament to the power of storytelling to transform personal pain into universal truth, and her work continues to inspire readers and writers alike.