A few months after Hilary Mantel died in September 2022, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell was browsing in a bookshop. Stopping at a table of new novels, she noticed a couple with Mantel’s endorsement on the cover, which, she tells me, she generally regards as instantly justifying the book’s price. This time, though, “I suddenly thought there aren’t going to be many more of these. It was such a sad moment. We’re not going to get another Mantel book, and we’re also not going to get to know about the books that she read and loved.”
To many readers who gobbled up Mantel’s books – 17 of them, including the novel Beyond Black, and the Wolf Hall trilogy, which won two Booker prizes – it’s extraordinary that she found time or energy for anything beside the mammoth research that her vast historical enterprises entailed, not to mention her enthusiastic and detailed involvement in their various adaptations. But Mantel was an engaged and enthusiastic supporter of other writers, especially those in the crucial early stages of their careers. Perhaps she never forgot how long it took her to see the first novel she wrote, A Place of Greater Safety, finally emerge in print in 1992.
