There is a line in Hilary Mantel’s 2008 essay The Books I Will Never Write that leaps out with particular poignancy, a year after her death. To tell the stories of all the incidental historical characters whose lives “would weave a beautiful fiction”, she says, “I shall have to live till I’m 90 and never retire”. If only, you think. When Mantel died in September 2022 at the age of 70, she was “a writer at the peak of her powers, one for whom fresh creative vistas were just opening up”, as her longtime editor, Nicholas Pearson, writes in the foreword to A Memoir of My Former Self, a posthumous collection of articles spanning four decades of her nonfiction. The thought of all the books she might have written had she lived another 20 years is almost too painful to contemplate. (Pearson also drops in the teasing detail that she had been working on a new novel, Provocation, about Mary Bennet from Pride and Prejudice; of the many writers who have attempted to extend the life of Austen’s characters, it’s hard to think of anyone else who could have hewed so closely to Austen’s waspish humour and keen eye for human folly, as the essay Not “Everybody’s Dear Jane”, reprinted here, can testify.
But we must be grateful that she has left us this collection of pieces, thoughtfully compiled by Pearson into five thematic sections corresponding to different aspects of Mantel’s writing life, and illustrated with personal photographs. She was a prolific contributor to newspapers and periodicals on a range of subjects, from politics and religion to perfume and cricket, in addition to her numerous essays on the craft of writing fiction and on her own history.
“I am writing to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness,” Mantel declared in her only volume of memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, and the opening section of the collection gathers those essays where she supplemented this story with further personal reflections on her place in the world as a woman. These often centre on the experience of living with chronic pain, as “an unwilling stranger in my own body”. Giving Up the Ghost detailed her suffering with undiagnosed endometriosis through her teens and 20s, and the drastic, avoidable surgery that left her infertile and caused her weight to double in its aftermath. Flashes of anger at the irreversible damage resulting from dismissal and condescension by the medical establishment erupt at intervals throughout these pieces, though occasionally that anger is turned in on herself for her own acquiescence. In the 2009 essay Female Role Novels, she rails against the examples of patient suffering offered to her as a child by the book What Katy Did, and draws a direct line from that (and her Catholic upbringing) to her later experience: “If I had regarded pain as an insult and an outrage, I might have made such a nuisance of myself that I got help; my medical history and my life would have been different.”
For the last 12 years of her life, with the critical and commercial success of her Wolf Hall trilogy, Mantel was celebrated as the pre-eminent writer of historical fiction in English, and her 2017 Reith lectures are published here, forming what amounts to the clearest analysis of the historical novel in recent literary criticism (and a succinct practical guide for would-be writers). But she was also keenly interested in contemporary culture. Readers newer to her work may not know that she was the Spectator’s film critic from 1987 to 1990, producing more than 160 reviews; selected highlights appear here under the heading Writing in the Dark. If you’ve ever wondered what she made of RoboCop or Withnail and I, the wait is over – though inevitably these reviews are the pieces that have dated most obviously.
But Mantel was, above all, a reader – “addicted to the physical act of reading” – and, while her selected literary essays from the New York Review of Books are fascinating, the pieces that feel timeless here are those that illuminate the unique alchemy of reading and writing that sparked her own work. Observing that she often becomes ill after completing a novel, she writes in 2008, at the end of Wolf Hall, “imagine the cold I’m going to have when the whole project’s finished, another two or three years from now.” A wry editorial footnote reminds us that the Wolf Hall trilogy was “finally finished 12 years later”.
There are obvious gaps; the demands of her Cromwell novels and their stage adaptations left less time for journalism over the last decade, and there are few pieces here relating to recent political events. One exception is Bryant Park: A Memoir, in which she recounts flying home from New York during the night of the 2016 presidential election. A member of the cabin crew with “a fallen face” brings news of the result: “I took off my watch to adjust it, unsure how many centuries to set it back.” Her admirers may feel the absence of her voice on so many current issues, but she would disapprove of that sentiment: “Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day,” she says in On the Other Hand.
Yet her worldview – expansive, tolerant of complexity, outward-looking – is watermarked throughout this collection. “It is the duty and privilege of the novelist to look both outward and inward, to the past and to the future, to the particular and the universal, to the parish and the world,” she wrote in No Passport Required, a piece from 2002 reflecting on our relationship with Europe with an optimism that seems now to belong to another age.
Revisiting these pieces, with their fierce wit, their dark humour and compassion, is like hearing the voice of an old friend you had not expected to encounter again. Is it really her final book, as the press release claims? At one point, Mantel casually mentions that she has 97 notebooks in a wooden box; we can only hope that some of those words may yet find their way into print. In the meantime, A Memoir of My Former Self is a fine testament to that remarkable imagination – a reminder of what a voice we have lost, and how fortunate we are that she left us so much.
A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel is published by John Murray (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
