Hilary Mantel

Mantel's body of work spanned memoir, short stories, essays — and, of course, historical fiction. Here's a guide to her writing.

In 1998, Mantel cut to the chase in the first line of her review of Mary Gordon’s novel, “Spending”: “Sex, art, money: That’s what it’s all about,” she wrote. In this novel, a woman tries to reconstruct her dead mother’s emotional history using a handful of objects — a pink kimono, a notebook with cryptic scribblings. In 2012, Mantel contributed a tart, honest and witty essay about working as an English teacher in Botswana in the 1970s. “Once those voices begin,” said Mantel, who had been fascinated by the life of Thomas Cromwell since she was a child, “it’s like having the radio on in the background for 15 years. What is it like for an author to shepherd her story onto the stage? In this interview, brimming with marvelous, craggy detail about writing and reading, Mantel told The Times that the best part of working on a book was “the moment, at about the three-quarter point, where you see your way right through to the end: as if lights had flooded an unlit road. Mantel’s seventh novel, and her second to be published in the United States, follows the adult Carmel McBain, who, in a “Proustian time-warp experience,” Margaret Atwood wrote in her review, falls down a rabbit hole of memories of her Catholic childhood and coming-of-age. [died on Thursday](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/books/hilary-mantel-dead.html) at age 70, left a wide-ranging and hard-to-classify body of work that encompassed memoir, story collections, contemporary novels and brilliant, querulous literary essays. This collection of work from The London Review of Books contains Mantel’s most incendiary essay, “Royal Bodies,” which compared Prince William’s wife, Catherine, to a plastic doll. It scalds.” The eldest child of poor Irish Catholic parents living outside Manchester, Mantel suffered fevers and “the crippling tedium and unintelligible torments of a rough Catholic primary school,” and was separated from her father at a young age. “The wonder of Ms. This fictional portrait of Henry VIII’s scheming aide Thomas Cromwell — the first volume of Mantel’s celebrated trilogy — won the Booker Prize in 2009.