The writer Hilary Mantel died of a stroke on Thursday. She was only seventy. As I write that I am struck by how odd it is to write such a thing. Time was I would never have said that someone was ONLY seventy. I can remember as a new young teacher considering some of the older teachers, the forty year olds, really ancient! Those were the days! Mind you, they were older at forty than my generation was at forty. And my daughter, at the grand old age of forty-two seems a positive spring chicken. All is relative!
But Hilary Mantel is dead and we have lost another brilliant member of our cultural society. When I acquired a copy of “The Mirror and the Light” the final book in her Tudor trilogy I re-read the first two before tackling the new addition. Total immersion in the life, and eventual death, of Thomas Cromwell.
Interviewed by the Guardian in 2021 when it was announced that her third and concluding Cromwell novel, The Mirror and the Light, would be staged in a partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London’s West End, she said at one point, “It is the job of novelist to work between the lines and I don’t think for a moment that anyone is confused between fact and fiction. Every time I say ‘he thought’, they know I’m making it up, that I do not have access to the inside of a dead man’s head.”
She knew that, so why do journalists presume to know what kind of emotional turmoil members of the royal family are or are not going through? And yet they insist on interpreting every gesture as proof that certain members of the family are at daggers drawn or are desperately unhappy. All fiction! I prefer my fiction to be about fictional characters or at least historical characters. And I prefer my fiction to be well written.
Hilary Mantel apparently wrote for years and years before she eventually published. Nowadays I hear of young writers being published to great acclaim in their very early twenties, some of them not writing anywhere near as well as Hilary Mantel, well, in my humble opinion! Different times? Different reading public? Who knows?
Throughout her adult life Hilary Mantel suffered from endometriosis, a painful female condition which is much better publicised and understood than when she was young woman. She was more fortunate than some who suffer from this condition as she could at least “escape” into her creativity.
“I started writing in earnest at 22. I thought: I am a wreck and have no money and am in poor health – and so how am I going to impose myself on the world? I was seethingly ambitious, I don’t make any secret of that. I needed to be somebody. The only way I could think of was by writing. Because all you need is paper and pencil and you can do it horizontal. But it was never an escape, nor was it the place I was running to – because it wasn’t a refuge – but it was what enabled me, it was my source of power and it was all I’d got and it was the cheapest source of power. Words are free. And when I think: what do I retain from the old days? It’s a turn of phrase.”
Just think, wIthout her illness, we might never have had any of her great works, as she was headed for a career as a barrister. One of those strange twists of fate!
We need some more wise women like her.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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