Blame it on the Belgians
Hilary Mantel, 25 June 1992
‘You don’t want to see him,’ said the porter at Corpus, when Charles Nicholl went to Cambridge to look at the portrait that is probably Christopher Marlowe. ‘He died in a tavern brawl.’
Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel was the author of nine novels and three collections of short stories in addition to her prize-winning trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. She began to write for the LRB in 1987 and contributed more than fifty pieces to the paper on subjects ranging from some of the Tudors who appear in her trilogy (Jane Boleyn, Queen Mary, Charles Brandon and Margaret Pole) to some of the figures who appear in A Place of Greater Safety, her novel about the French Revolution: Danton, Robespierre (twice), Théroigne de Méricourt and Marie Antoinette. Royal Bodies, her Winter Lecture for the LRB, considered the public perception of royal women from Anne Boleyn to Kate Middleton: ‘we don’t cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them.’ She also published several pieces of memoir in the LRB, on her childhood, the misdiagnosis of her endometriosis as mental illness, and the childlessness that was its result. Mantel Pieces: ‘Royal Bodies’ and Other Writing for the London Review of Books was published by Fourth Estate in 2020.
Homophobic
Hilary Mantel, 13 May 1993
It was Renault, pronounced Renolt, not as in the car: this is one of the many things her admirers will not have known about the low-profile, best-selling author of some of the most remarkable historical fiction of the century. David Sweetman met Mary Renault in 1981, when he interviewed her for the BBC; he had been under the spell of her books since he read them as ‘an awkward, insecure teenager’. He brings to the art of biography a well-intentioned gentleness that is rare; but it is odd and unfortunate that by the end of his book one admires his subject less rather than more.
Eunice’s Story
Hilary Mantel, 20 October 1994
The Indians attacked in the dead of winter, before dawn. The first the minister knew of it was the sound of axes breaking open his windows and doors. Moments later, twenty painted savages were in his house. Bound and helpless, he watched them kill his six-year-old son, his new baby of six weeks and his black woman slave.
Pointing Out the Defects
Hilary Mantel, 22 December 1994
Perhaps it is the timing of her birth which has refined her sense of scale, has made her able to see how the single ant works and worries in the social heap. ‘That was important,’ Doris Lessing says: to be born in 1919, when 29 million people died in the influenza pandemic. Important, too, the blue marks left on her face by the forceps. She was a child of damage, ‘one of the walking wounded’.
‘Shop!’
Hilary Mantel, 4 April 1996
On the day after Kate Atkinson’s first novel won the Whitbread Prize, the Guardian’s headline read: ‘Rushdie makes it a losing double.’ Thus Rushdie is reminded of his disappointments, Atkinson gets no credit, and the uninformed reader assumes that this year’s Whitbread is a damp squib. But read on. ‘A 44-year-old chambermaid won one of Britain’s leading literary awards last night.’
Podcasts & Videos
Podcast
Story: ‘The School of English’
Hilary Mantel
6 May 2015
Hilary Mantel reads her short story, ‘The School of English’.
Podcast
Royal Bodies
Hilary Mantel
21 February 2013
Hilary Mantel delivers her lecture on the royal body, from Anne Boleyn’s ‘bosom not much raised’ to Kate Middleton’s equally modest endowment.
Pieces about Hilary Mantel in the LRB
Charm with Menaces: ‘The Mirror and the Light’
Colin Burrow, 19 March 2020
At moments Mantel might have heeded the words addressed by her Wyatt to Cromwell: ‘Be careful . . . You are on the brink of explaining yourself.’
On your way, phantom: ‘Bring Up the Bodies’
Colin Burrow, 7 June 2012
Bring Up the Bodies is not just a historical novel. It’s a novel with a vision of history that magically suits the period it describes. Its predecessor, Wolf Hall, the first part of what...
How to Twist a Knife: Wolf Hall
Colin Burrow, 30 April 2009
There was no shortage of bastards in the early 16th century, but Thomas Cromwell stands out as one of the biggest bastards of them all. His surviving correspondence shows the energy, efficiency...
The trouble is I’m dead: Hilary Mantel’s Fiends
Elizabeth Lowry, 19 May 2005
Hilary Mantel’s dark, unsettling and gleefully tasteless new novel about spiritualism, Hell and the condition of contemporary England is part ghost story, part mystery, and as alarmingly...
Freak Anatomist: Hilary Mantel
John Mullan, 1 October 1998
In the Council Room of the Royal College of Surgeons hangs the portrait by Joshua Reynolds of the 18th-century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter. It has been much darkened by the bitumen content...
The Little Woman Inside
Dinah Birch, 9 March 1995
Women of my age, born in the early Fifties and now in our forties, have reached the season of retrospection. We have become – or have not become – wives, wage-earners, mothers,...
A Form of Showing Off
Anna Vaux, 28 April 1994
‘If God knows our ends, why cannot he prevent them, why is the world so full of malice and cruelty, why did God make it at all and give us free will if he knows already that some of us will...
Falling for Desmoulins
P.N. Furbank, 20 August 1992
When Sarah Orne Jewett sent her friend Henry James a copy of her latest work, a historical novel entitled The Tory Lover, he told her it would take a very long letter to ‘disembroil the...
Looking for magic
Dinah Birch, 14 September 1989
It’s not long since the fairy story seemed the least political of genres. Not so today. A preoccupation with transformation and escape, coupled with a repudiation of the sober certainties...
You bet your life
Margaret Walters, 21 April 1988
Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a tall story, as elaborate and fantastical as any of the yarns spun by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. For one thing, it’s a...
Belfast Book
Patricia Craig, 5 June 1986
The first of these writers, M.S. Power, has a searing metaphor to describe the effect of Ireland on certain people, those native to it and others: nailed to the place, they end up as in a...
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