Hilary Mantel and the Ghost of Thomas Cromwell

 Hilary Mantel RIP  (1952-2022)


Hilary Mantel is one of the most-featured authors on this blog - click the tabs for her name or Wolf Hall and see a lot of posts. When the third book of her Cromwell/Tudor trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, was published in 2020 I rounded up my thoughts and my history with the book:
Since the second book's publication, I have heard Hilary Mantel talk (riveting, though you wouldn’t have wanted to be a person who asked her a stupid question), read Diarmaid MacCulloch’s biography of Thomas Cromwell, heard DMcC talk and met him briefly. In New York l visited the Frick Collection to see the Holbein portraits that feature in the book. These books have been part of my life for more than ten years. For me, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are the great literary achievements of the 21st century, and now this one joins them. My note says ‘5-star Absolutely superb, brilliant, breath-taking. Very long and detailed, but perfect.’

Her death was unexpected and sad, and I wrote about her life, legacy and works in this article for the i newspaper. I wanted to explain why I thought the books in her trilogy are the best novels of the 21st century, and describe the time I heard her talking about Thomas Cromwell's ghost.

 

Click here to read it 




 


 


 

 

 

Comments

  1. Thank you for writing such an excellent piece, Moira. Her death is a real blow to us all, and she will be sorely missed.

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    1. Thanks for the kind words Margot. I am grateful for all the books we have, but sorry there won't be any more from her.

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  2. It is sad and shocking that Hilary Mantel is gone. Of her books, I have only read the Cromwell trilogy, and it was a very compelling series. And sparked my interest in the time period and Cromwell. Your article in the i newspaper was sincere and nicely written.

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    1. Very shocking, and unexpected I think. Thanks for the kind words. Her other books are worth a look - and most of them are shorter than the Cromwell books!

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  3. A great loss, and - by contemporary standards - so young that she could still have written more. Does it say something about the modern world that quite possibly the best novels of this century are set five hundred years ago?
    Not up with Mantel as books, but C.J. Sansom's Shardlake series gives a very different - more accurate personally perhaps - portrait of Cromwell and Ford Madox Ford's The Fifth Queenis another look at Henry VIII's marital politics.

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    1. Indeed, and I have just read someone saying that they wish Mantel had written more about modern life rather than going back to the Tudors, as they felt her skills more useful that way.
      I have enjoyed the Shardlake books very much but they do get longer and longer - the first one was the most gripping. The Fifth Queen trilogy I read because you suggested it, and I liked it very much, I think about it surprisingly often. I loved the way FMF portrayed Catherine Howard and Cromwell, I think the story was well-suited to his way of looking at people.

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  4. Thinking about Clothes in Books and the Tudors, have you come across No Bed For Bacon by S.J. Brahms and Caryl Simon? Quite a lot about Elizabethan clothes in there.

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    1. When I was in my late teens I had a go at Brahms and Simon, and couldn't get on with them at all (Bullet in the Ballet maybe? and maybe another one - I can visualise the copies in my local library, a place I haunted and where I tried out a lot of authors). It is quite possible that it is time for a more mature me to try them again.

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    2. Apologies for the repetition - FMF is someone I recommend at every opportunity, I'm afraid.

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    3. Ford Madox Ford: I do too, though I'm not sure how much people take to him! Though - I think I mentioned a piece I wrote in the Guardian about Sylvia Tietjens - for a series on book villains - and you'd think it would be pretty niche, but was weirdly successful, very high number of cllicks. I do LIKE to think hundreds of Guardian readers set off to read Parade's End, though it seems unlikely. I think the TV series, and a very nice picture of Rebecca Hall playing Sylvia, might be the reason.
      And I was nothing but grateful for the recommendation for Fifth Queen, and better twice than not at all!

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    4. I'm not sure that Sylvia Tietjens is a villain. Tirtjens himself is FMF's fantasy English gentleman, and if anyone deserved getting Sylvia turned loose on him, he did!

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    5. I was so glad to find this post. I too experienced Hilary Mantel's death as an almost personal loss - I felt stunned when I heard she was gone. I discovered her writing over 30 years ago and felt like she was my personal discovery - no one I knew had even heard of her; then when she burst onto the world with Wolf Hall it felt like a friend had made it to Broadway.

      Your article is lovely and so accurate - the odd voice, the acerbic wit, the comfortable way with ghosts. An amazing woman and a terrible loss to literature, in spite of all that she gave the world.

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    6. Roger: Well it's good to have someone standing up for Sylvia - I thought she was wicked but admirable. And I did feel they deserved each other.

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    7. Jo: thanks so much for those kind words, you made me feel I succeeded in what I was trying to do in the article, and yes, you and I obviously felt just the same.

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