Hilary Mantel Has Died

 In prison, I read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies. Anyone thinking they know the historical novel need to read these novels. She makes history personal. She also died last week.

The Guardian was quite extravagant in its coverage of her death, with the survey Hilary Mantel remembered: ‘She was the queen of literature’ and the op/ed Hilary Mantel on grief. From the latter comes:

In her other life, as an essayist over many years, mainly for the LRB, she drew provocative parallels between establishments past and present, memorably describing Diana, Princess of Wales, as an icon “only loosely based on the young woman born Diana Spencer” and comparing Kate Middleton to Anne Boleyn. That history was a battlefield strewn with the bodies of women was one of her most persistent themes in both fiction and nonfiction.

Most of her essays were written at a time when her novels were a well-kept secret: for years she suffered from a refusal to sit quietly in an easily marketed pigeonhole. For all her enjoyment of her belated success, she remained a glorious original. We shall not see her like again.

And they also published one of those essays, Hilary Mantel on grief. Brilliant, relevant to all of us - who truly knows how to live with grief? 

Lapham's Quarterly published Mantel's We Live in History Accepting the 2022 Janus Prize:

ll my work has been an effort to show my readers that history is not a discrete discipline, separable from our ordinary lives. We live in history. We breathe it in and breathe it out. As I record this, the news is dominated by Ukraine, but it’s just one of many corrosive global conflicts based on clashes of interests and values that we must somehow resolve before we are destroyed. It’s not enough to express horror—we must understand as well as denounce and recoil. We must think, and to think we need context, and to have context we need history, history at the center of our teaching and learning. I can’t say that historians are better men and women than other people, and I don’t claim either their expertise can save us, but I do believe the practice of history encourages the cardinal virtues of which we’re so much in need at present: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. But not too much temperance, not this evening. I hope you have a most enjoyable time. Thank you for honoring me with this prize. I’m truly grateful.

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