Hilary Mantel in 2020
(Picture: Getty Images)I met Hilary Mantel in 2013 in Clapham. She was working with the Royal Shakespeare Company to turn Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies into plays.
I had marvelled at her prose, of course. When I read Wolf Hall it spooled out, as if she was inexhaustible. I kept saying, “It’s better than Jane Eyre”. (A book by a similarly almost-thwarted female artist filled with sensibility. Both Brontë and Mantel were told not to write for their health as young women.) Then I read A Place of Greater Safety, her book about the French Revolution, and I thought it was better: she finished it when she was 27, it was a masterpiece, and no one would publish it for 13 years. (Meanwhile, people asked her: Do you self-publish? Do you write children’s books?) Then I read her memoir Giving Up the Ghost and thought it was better: “I’ve always been addicted to something or other, usually something there’s no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than 200 words at a time”.
