Hilary Mantel

Standard Name: Mantel, Hilary
Birth Name: Hilary Mary Thompson
Self-constructed Name: Hilary Mantel
Married Name: Hilary Mary McEwan
The author of twelve novels (ranging from political thrillers through social satire, comedy of manners, and near-gothic), still at the height of her career, HM has been likened to Muriel Spark or Edna O'Brien for the sharpness of her humour, and to Graham Greene for her command of suspense and of accurately rendered political background. She has also published memoirs and short fiction. She is a leading practitioner of the current form of the historical novel, and her fiction encompasses as wide a variety of geographical as of historical settings, from Africa to Saudi Arabia, Ireland, northern England, and revolutionary France.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
271
She has more sparked controversy with her treatment of royal or political figures of her own time.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Penelope Shuttle
PSwrites five mornings per week and, when a fragment hits, always has a notebook to hand. She always leaves first drafts to settle for a few weeks.Influences on her writing, she says, include...
Literary responses Toni Morrison
TM won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. Black writers and critics had protested when it did not receive a National Book Award.
Cooke, Rachel. “America is going backwards”. The Observer, 19 Sept. 2004, p. 15.
15
Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Twayne, 1990.
xiv
She said of this novel, I am not interested in...
Literary responses Catherine Byron
Critics responded with excitement to the fleshiness and sensuality of this volume, which they felt drew the reader in both emotionally and physically. Hilary Mantel declared that CB 's poems write themselves where they ought...
Literary responses Anita Desai
Hilary Mantel , who found the proof-reading unsatisfactory and the explanatory notes robotic and elementary, praised Desai's introduction as graceful.
Mantel, Hilary. “Balm of Mecca”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4708, 25 June 1993, p. 6.
6
Literary responses Jane Gardam
The TLS review by Victoria Glendinning found JG in this collection better at people than at plots, and dealing out more scrutiny and more punishment to women than to men.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
(18 April 1980): 430
In...
Literary responses Virginia Woolf
Though he had accepted it for publication, Eliot had initially expressed little enthusiasm for this essay.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Editors Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press, 1977–1984, 5 vols.
3: 49
Hilary Mantel , reading this essay while very ill herself, indignantly rejected what she saw as Woolf's...
Literary responses Sarah Waters
Waters says that while some of her lesbian readers felt angry or let down by her writing a book without lesbian content, this was the book that my 10-year-old self was destined to write.
qtd. in
Allardice, Lisa. “Sarah Waters: ’Some of my readers really did hate me. They felt let down’”. theguardian.com, 15 Sept. 2018.
Hilary Mantel
Literary responses Elizabeth Jenkins
The novel was criticised by some for its exclusively upper-middle-class reach—a view which was energetically countered by Rose Macaulay on a radio programme.
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson, 2004.
107
The Times Literary Supplement welcomed with joy a novel where the...
Publishing Norah Lofts
She followed this with further historical studies. After observing everyday conditions in Domestic Life in England, 1976, she turned to the highest level of society in Queens of Britain, 1977.
Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Gale Research, 1981–2024, Numerous volumes.
80
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
NL also...
Reception Anita Brookner
This book provoked an unusual article from journalist Mark Lawson , centred less on Brookner than on his own response. I have mocked her dessicated sentences, characterless protagonists and action-free narratives, he wrote. The gist...
Reception A. S. Byatt
David Jays , in an article confessing his preference for the current lionesses to the lions among British novelists—a preference, that is, for ASB , Zadie Smith , A. L. Kennedy , Sarah Waters ...
Textual Production Penelope Fitzgerald
A volume of PF 's letters appeared in print in 2008, edited by her son-in-law Terence Dooley and titled So I Have Thought of You, with a preface by A. S. Byatt . The...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Diana Athill
Nicholas Lezard wrote in the Guardian that this book teaches, in every line[,] the consolations of age, the common, shareable tone of experience. Athill begins the book, in fact, with her own old age, and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Margaret Atwood
Subjects include English women writers Virginia Woolf , Antonia Fraser , Marina Warner , and Hilary Mantel , Americans Toni Morrison and Ursula Le Guin, as well as the reluctant Canadian Susanna Moodie and...

Timeline

Summer 2005: News broke that one of the bestselling nonfiction...

Women writers item

Summer 2005

News broke that one of the bestselling nonfiction books of the year, Judith Kelly 's Rock Me Gently, included passages almost verbally identical with passages by other authors.
Leith, Sam. “Sounds familiar? When ’memories’ seem to spring from other literary sources”. Telegraph.co.uk, 6 Aug. 2005.

21 May 2013: Sotheby's held an auction of fifty contemporary...

Writing climate item

21 May 2013

Sotheby's held an auction of fifty contemporary first editions annotated for the purpose of this sale by their authors. A total of £439,200 was raised for English PEN , of which £150,000 (the highest price)...

Texts

Mantel, Hilary. “’Every part of my body hurt’”. Guardian Unlimited.
Mantel, Hilary. “’I have only a little neck’”. The Guardian, pp. Review 2 - 4.
Mantel, Hilary. A Change of Climate. Viking, 1994.
Mantel, Hilary. A Place of Greater Safety. Viking, 1992.
Mantel, Hilary. A Place of Greater Safety. Atheneum, 1993.
Mantel, Hilary. An Experiment in Love. Viking, 1995.
Mantel, Hilary. “Author, author”. The Guardian, p. Review 17.
Mantel, Hilary. “Balm of Mecca”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4708, p. 6.
Mantel, Hilary. Beyond Black. Fourth Estate, 2005.
Mantel, Hilary. Bring Up the Bodies. HarperCollins Fourth Estate, 2012.
Mantel, Hilary. “Christmas books, Past, present and future”. Guardian Weekly, pp. Books 52 - 4.
Mantel, Hilary. “Diary”. London Review of Books, Vol.
32
, No. 21, pp. 41-3.
Mantel, Hilary. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. Penguin, 1988.
Mantel, Hilary. Every Day is Mother’s Day. Chatto and Windus, 1985.
Mantel, Hilary. “Fate is rarely kind and nature never”. Guardian Weekly, p. 37.
Mantel, Hilary. Fludd. Viking, 1989.
Mantel, Hilary. “Freelance”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4548, p. 580.
Mantel, Hilary. Giving up the Ghost. Fourth Estate, 2003.
Mantel, Hilary. “Giving up the Ghost: A Memoir”. London Review of Books, pp. 8-13.
Mantel, Hilary. “In a Right State”. London Review of Books, Vol.
38
, No. 4, pp. 17-18.
Mantel, Hilary. Learning to Talk. Fourth Estate, 2003.
Mantel, Hilary. “No Passes or Documents Are Needed: The Writer at Home in Europe”. On Modern British Fiction, edited by Zachary Leader, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 93-106.
Mantel, Hilary. “Q&A”. The Observer, p. New Review 5.
Mantel, Hilary. “Royal Bodies”. London Review of Books, Vol.
35
, No. 4, pp. 3-7.
Mantel, Hilary. “Someone to Disturb: a memoir”. London Review of Books, Vol.
31
, No. 1, pp. 13-17.