“What might she have written next?” asked Margaret Atwood in her tribute to Hilary Mantel, after the Booker prize-winning novelist’s sudden death in September last year. “I don’t know, but I will miss it.” In this, she spoke for readers around the world, eagerly awaiting a new book from the author of the Wolf Hall trilogy. Aside from her Cromwell novels, Mantel had a habit of confounding expectations, with each new work so different from its predecessor.
We now know the answer to Atwood’s question: Mantel was working on a rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, told from the perspective of the overlooked middle sister Mary Bennet, to be titled Provocation. Even more intriguingly, it was planned as a mischievous Austen mashup, with characters from all her novels making an appearance in unfamiliar guises. From 2,000 pages of bloody Tudor pageantry to Austen’s two-inches of ivory, it is a dizzying shift in scale. “I think she thought, ‘I can just have a whole load of fun,’” says her long-term agent, Bill Hamilton. “She felt that it was time to get away from the really serious research and the big historical novels, to do something lighter.”
