Omission: Hilary Mantel is not forgotten

By Catherine Carroll, February 27, 2023. Word count: 2,995

On the last Friday evening of 2022, I was on the PBS NewHour’s website watching the video of their long-time anchor Judy Woodruff’s departure speech.  I got distracted by a headline to the right of the video:  Influential people we said goodbye to in 2022 | PBS NewsHour.  I read the introduction and then scrolled through the months.  When I got to September I paused at Queen Elizabeth and then continued slowly.   Wait.  Hilary Mantel’s name is not on their list!  I knew exactly when she died, two weeks after the Queen.  I scrolled through again, more slowly, looking for an error.  The list of those who died in 2022 was long.  Many names were quite obscure although, no doubt, these people had done important things.   Incredibly, Hilary Mantel’s name was not on the NewsHours list.  I sent an email to the NewsHour expressing my dismay in their omission and received their kick-back email. Seriously?  Don’t email, just fix it!   The omission was never corrected and one of the greatest writers of our time did not make the “roll call of some influential figures who died in 2022”.  It seemed impossible. 

One night five weeks later, around midnight, with my tears blurring the words on the page, I finished reading Hilary Mantel's The Mirror & The Light, finally completing her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.  The 750 page Mirror & The Light had been on my bookshelf waiting for the right time when, on September 23, 2022, I opened The New York Times to read that Dame Hilary Mantel had died the day before.  Along with readers worldwide I was stricken.  Mine was just one of the hundreds of comments posted to her New York Times obituary.  Now was the right time; I set all other reading aside and began reading The Mirror & The Light.  I am cursed to be a slow reader.  But Hilary Mantel acknowledged:  "It was the hardest to write and it's probably the most demanding for the reader ..." (The Guardian, Hilary Mantel: 'I am disappointed but freed' by Booker decision.') 

 

Back when we purchased our books from book stores, I bought a paperback novel titled Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988) just because the cover description was so compelling.  I had never heard of the author.  I began reading and could not put it down.  Then, in 2009, I read a review of Wolf Hall.  I recognized the author’s name.  The reviewer wrote, “Reader, you are in good hands.”  I loved the reassurance of that.  I purchased Wolf Hall and, a few pages in, realized that it would require attention to detail that, just then, I was unable to give.  I was working long hours and after work was too tired to focus on the complex story.  In 2013. I injured my knee that required surgery to repair and was off work for eight weeks.  I remembered Wolf Hall on my bookshelf.  Knowing next to nothing about the Tudors, but guided by ‘Reader, you are in good hands’ my reading was compulsive and, this time, I could not put it down.  Shortly thereafter I read Bring up the Bodies.  Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize for both books.  Then, because she was still writing it, like everyone else I waited for the publication of The Mirror & the Light. 

All that I knew of Hilary MantelI came from reading her book reviews, but after her death I wanted to know more.  I purchased A Place of Greater Safety, Learning to Talk, Mantel Pieces and Giving Up the Ghost (a memoir like no other).  I read her London Review of Books essays, her Paris Review and other interviews and watched many YouTube videos of her interviews, award presentations and lectures.  It’s arrogant of me to suggest that, by coincidence, we shared many childhood similarities - we all know that this can never really be the case - but the similarities only made me like her more.  Forgive me for the next two paragraphs, but I must. 

  

Hilary Mantel was born in early July, 1952 and two weeks later I was born.  She came from an Irish Catholic family and so did I.  We were both first born.  Her family life was challenging as was mine.  We both had a strong bond with a maternal grandparent: her’s with her grandfather; mine with my grandmother.  I avoided the strange family structure that Hilary’s mother foisted upon her family, ultimately depriving Hilary of her relationship with her father.  My challenge was my father’s mercurial and troubled personality; more akin to Hilary’s stepfather’s personality.  Hilary attended Catholic school as did I.  From Giving Up the Ghost I discerned that she was a better academic child than I was.  Though she did not like school, she was bright, observant, imaginative and self-motivated.  I was anxious and lacked the confidence to be a good pupil; although Hilary was probably also an anxious child.  I agree with her observation that children from wealthier families received more attention than those from large and poorer families.  BorderKitchen interview Hilary Mantel about The Mirror and the Light - Cromwell Trilogy 30.10.2019 (at 8 mins:30 sec; and other sources.)  I think this was a feature of Catholic schools, and may still be.  In the BBC documentary, Hilary Mantel - Return to Wolf Hall, she speaks of the cruelty of the priests and nuns which, at worst, I only glimpsed.  She wrote about being poor.  The Irish author Anne Enright wrote of Hilary Mantel:  “She described a childhood so frugal and windswept that she was 11 years old before she saw a rose.”  Such elegant prose does not describe my family’s poverty, but I knew we were poor.  We both came to reading at a very young age and loved the library but Hilary’s reading had more depth.  Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson was her favorite childhood novel.  The English and American education systems are structured differently, but she made clear that her parents were intelligent people who had been denied an education and, thereby, denied chances in life.  My own parents’ education ended with graduation from high school and we were a striving family.   Even though I was a poor academic student, education was important to me; Hilary was a good student and earned a scholarship to attend the London School of Economics.  In Giving Up the Ghost she writes about her childhood experience of seeing evil lurking in her rear garden and the feeling of shame (pages 93-94).  I did not see evil but I knew about shame and understood what she had experienced.  We were both seven or eight years old when that happened to her.

If only I had arrived a few years earlier, our paths could have crossed at the University of Sheffield where, in 1973, Hilary Mantel completed her degree after running out of money to continue studying at the London School of Economics. I arrived in Sheffield as an exchange student in January 1977.  By then Hilary and her husband Gerald McEwen lived in Manchester where he was a teacher and she worked at Kendals department store.  They left Manchester in the spring of 1977 to live in Botswana where her husband had taken a job as a geologist.  It’s while Hilary was in Botswana that we shared our final link.  In her Paris Review interview she says, “I became a teacher by accident.”  She taught English and Shakespeare and enjoyed her students and teaching, but decided to leave the school after she was attacked by a random pupil.  She was unharmed, but was not supported by the school (The Paris Review, Hilary Mantel).  In Sheffield my goals were unclear and, while my experience was good, I can’t honestly say I made much of my time there other than taking on a fake English accent bringing no end of ridicule from my family and friends.  When I returned home I also taught English, but I wasn’t a good teacher and left the profession after two years of trying.  At age 22 Hilary began writing A Place of Greater Safety and devoted the next five years of her life to complete a historical novel about the French Revolution.  It’s here that any similarities we may have shared (real or imagined) come to an abrupt end.  My path led to an undistinguished career in health care; the very field that caused Hilary so much trouble and robbed her of so much in her life.  In Giving Up The Ghost she writes several sharp vignettes revealing the indignities thrust upon her by physicians.  It’s while living in Botswana that Hilary, on her own, researched and accurately made the diagnosis of endometriosis (The Gentlewoman, Hilary Mantel.)  In one interview she said, of endometriosis generally, “It’s a common disease, but you have to look for it.”  In medical documentation we have the frowned upon, but still used, abbreviation WNL, meaning ‘within normal limits’, or derisively, ‘we never looked’.  

The honesty of Hilary Mantel’s writing is startling.  Her point of view is so different from that of any author I have read before and am unlikely to ever read again.  Her unique voice was not only present in her writing but was also evident in the many lectures and interviews she gave.  She was a riveting speaker and interviewee.  In YouTube videos of her interviews and award appearances the audience is mostly out of sight, but it’s easy to sense their rapt attention.  The vigorous applause afterwards confirms the audience's appreciation and perhaps their awareness that such greatness does not come along everyday.  

At night when I’m too tired to read, I occasionally watch Hilary Mantel videos on YouTube.  As with Secretariat’s Triple Crown victories or Zenyatta’s amazing come from behind wins; I think, thank God we have these videos.  Whether the interviews are on YouTube, via podcasts or are published in journals, newspapers or blogs, her generosity and honesty are always present.  Her voice is consistent and sincere and she is unfailingly polite, even when she is asked the same questions over and over.  One such question seems to have been “Why did you want to write about Thomas Cromwell?”  In less scholarly venues, her answer often began this way:   “Okay!  Thomas Cromwell was a blacksmith’s son.  He was born so obscurely that we don’t even know the date of his birth.  His father was not a poor man, but he was rough, he was trouble.  You wouldn’t want to be his neighbor …”  She was also funny.  Given that she was always forthright about her poor health, perhaps her death, while unexpected, was not really surprising.  In some of her more recent interviews she sometimes appeared to be struggling with her health.  But her engagement never wavered.  She began writing as a young woman but her literary and commercial success did not come to her until later.  It seemed clear that she was enjoying the success she so richly deserved.  But, it’s also a reminder that her death was untimely and that she was, yet again, robbed of her full glory.  She cannot now receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.  She was often asked about her next projects and said, “I’ve never been short of ideas …” BorderKitchen interview Hilary Mantel about The Mirror and the Light - Cromwell Trilogy 30.10.2019 (at 1 hr:13 mins), BBC World Service:  World Book Club podcast:  Hilary Mantel:  Bring Up the Bodies, Aug 4, 2018.  As with her involvement in the television and theater productions of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies - 2015 WJS interview Hilary Mantel, ‘Wolf Hall,’ Broadway and PBS (at 4:00 min) - there were discussions about bringing The Mirror & the Light to the stage.  She will never move to the home she and her husband purchased in West Cork, Ireland where she planned to pursue the next era of her writing.   

Is there a similarity with Thomas Cromwell’s death and her own?  Not literally of course.  Her head was not chopped off with an ax.  Thomas Cromwell worked hard all of his eventful life; it seems he was never not busy.. He had been imprisoned in the Tower of London for forty-eight days when his execution day came.  Cromwell knew Henry VIII so well that he knew he was going to die, but he still prayed for the king’s reprieve.  He was not finished with his work.  Hilary Mantel’s stroke occurred three days before her death.  The details are not known by us, but it was a very brief time between the stroke and her death.  Hilary Mantel was a prolific writer leaving a body of work stunning in its depth and originality.  It seemed that she was writing all the time but, remarkably, she also had time for other things.  Still her poor health was always there, lurking in the background like evil in her rear garden.  She worked and worked probably to make the very best use of the time she would have.  She was not finished with her work.

Over the course of her writing years she maintained a rich media presence - television, news profiles, lectures, literary interviews, podcasts, controversies and more.  After her death, the New York Times published What to Read By (and About) Hilary Mantel, an extensive starting point to the author and her writing.  The Guardian published: ‘Hilary Mantel remembered:  She was the queen of literature’ with moving tributes by contemporary writers.   To these excellent resources, I offer a few others.

 

If you Google “Hilary Mantel interviews” you will find a cornucopia of the generosity she left behind.   I recommend The Paris Review interview, Hilary Mantel, The Art of Fiction, No. 226 from 2015 - Hilary Mantel - as one of the best of her many good print interviews.  

Of her innumerable YouTube videos, I recommend an appearance she made on Skavlan, a Norwegian-Swedish television talk show hosted by Norwegian journalist Fredrik Skavlan -  Hilary Mantel | "I couldn't believe what I was seeing" | SVT/NRK/Skavlan. This may seem an odd choice, but In just twelve minutes so much is discussed and Hilary’s charm and honesty are on full display.

If someone who has not yet read Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy is somehow induced to do so by reading this essay I recommend, for its focus and brevity, the twenty-five minute YouTube video Hilary Mantel: The Waterstones Interview - Wolf Hall Trilogy.  Not only will it help you jump right into Wolf Hall and carry you along, it’s yet another example of the author’s extraordinary intellect, skill and generosity. 

YouTube briefly released the excellent BBC documentary: Hilary Mantel - Return to Wolf Hall which, unfortunately, is no longer available on YouTube, but will perhaps become available elsewhere. An hour long, it includes academic and personal commentary on the Thomas Cromwell trilogy with historians, publishers and actors reading, but it’s mostly Hilary Mantel and she’s mesmerizing.  About her trilogy and how she came to write it she said, “I suppose it comes from my own life.  It’s not having made it as a woman writer.  It’s having made it as a working class writer.”  She visits Wolf Hall which appears, unsurprisingly, quite run down.  Her memoir Giving Up the Ghost is frequently referenced and she returns to her childhood home, family life and school and, in her own words, discusses her childhood.

Hilary Mantel might be amused to learn she had been left off of some annual roll call of people who died.  Having watched so many videos, I can see her shrug her shoulders, hear her laugh and offer a funny comment.  But she cared very much about dead people.  Her gripping conclusion to Giving Up the Ghost ends, in part, with this:  “The table is laid, and the dead are peering at their place cards, and shuffling into their chairs, and shaking out their napkins, waiting, expectant, for whatever is next.  Food or entertainment, it’s all one to the eyeless, the shriveled and the thin: to the ones who have crossed into the land where only the living can provide their light” (page 223).  The BBC documentary, referencing The Mirror & the Light, ends with her own words:  “... I know for the readers it seems to have taken a long time.  But, for me, it’s not a day too long.  I could do more, but he’s dead.”   

The table is laid for you Dame Hilary Mantel, September 22, 2022.  You are not forgotten.  You are missed.  You are remembered. 

Afterward

The omission of Hilary Mantel from a prominent American news organization’s list of influential people who died in 2022 triggered me.  Of course it was accidental, but her absence from their list still seemed unimaginable.  Had I found her name on the list where it should have been I would never have written this. 

I hope I make clear how important a writer Hilary Mantel was to me as a reader.  That part of my story I can lay out with confidence.  After she died I read the articles and watched the videos, never thinking that I would write this essay and would need those references.  The quote from the reviewer, “Reader, you are in good hands,” or Hilary’s response about endometriosis made in a video - I can see the writing on the page, I can hear her voice answering the question - regretfully, I cannot relocate those references.  Other statements and information that are not linked to a specific source are well-documented in the voluminous information that is widely available.  Even many of the linked references have multiple sources. 

Initially, this essay was written hastily and was much shorter, but that version also had some inaccuracies.  I returned to the essay to fill in some missing pieces and correct my errors.  Unfortunately, doing so added length.  I hope the extra words make it better, not just longer.  Hilary Mantel appreciated and respected her readers.  I don’t think she expected us to be writers.  I do think she would appreciate being remembered in this way.