Somewhere round about, as I write about her and you read about her, Hilary Mantel is present…. I imagine her raised eyebrow, her incredulous laugh, as she looks over my shoulder at the computer screen.

For the Review’s May 23 issue, Clair Wills writes about Hilary Mantel’s life and work. Over a prolific career that encompassed criticism (“She sits in the cinema, rolling her eyes”), journalism (“astringent takedowns of the ailing British monarchy’s attempts to manufacture and maintain itself through the bodies of its women”), and fiction (“not since Sir Walter Scott has historical fiction enjoyed such a reputation in English letters”), Mantel was motivated, Wills argues, by “the attempt to imagine or to understand (the two verbs are almost interchangeable in her lexicon) the relationship between people and the structures of power that support and constrain them. The remarkable thing is that she managed to persuade that most philistine of bodies, the British public, that the way to do this was through fiction.”

Below, alongside Wills’s article, we have compiled from the archives a selection of essays by and about Hilary Mantel.

Clair Wills
Triumphs of Skepticism

Hilary Mantel wrote in favor of the doubting, the irreverent, and even the fickle against conservatism, nostalgia, and sentiment.

Jenny Uglow
Hilary Mantel (1952–2022)

Hilary Mantel’s novels and short stories demonstrated that while the historical record can tell us what people did, only fiction can imagine what they felt and thought.

Fintan O’Toole
The Explosions from Wolf Hall

“This is the drama of Mantel’s Cromwell—he is the perfect bourgeois in a world where being perfectly bourgeois doesn’t buy you freedom from the knowledge that everything you have can be whipped away from you at any moment. The terror that grips us is rooted not in Cromwell’s weakness but in his extraordinary strength.”

Stanley Wells
In the Court of a Monster

“Mantel is a modern storyteller, making no attempt to imitate the language of the period. But she often writes poetically, evoking (or should we say creating?) the beauties and the sordidness, the tenderness and the cruelty of the Tudor world. Early in the book she sets Henry within a romantic landscape of an England in which ‘our forefathers the giants left their earthworks, their barrows and standing stones. We still have, every Englishman and woman, some drops of giant blood in our veins.’”

Stephen Greenblatt
How It Must Have Been

“Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a startling achievement, a brilliant historical novel focused on the rise to power of a figure exceedingly unlikely, on the face of things, to arouse any sympathy at all. To be sure, one could imagine worse: we are not being invited to enter the life of, say, Stalin’s sinister henchman Lavrenti Beria. But Thomas Cromwell, the focus of Mantel’s loving attention for almost six hundred pages, is not that distant from the bureaucratic architect of the Great Purge.”

John Banville
The Furies

“If there is such a thing as the common reader, then Hilary Mantel is the common writer, in the best sense. She has written novels on a variety of subjects, among them the French Revolution, the life of an eighteenth-century Irish giant, black magic in Africa, Saudi Arabian politics. All of her work is concerned, at one level or another, with the causes, the nature, and the consequences of evil; God does not deign to dabble in the world as Mantel conceives it.”

Joyce Carol Oates
Stranded in the Dark

“Mantel speaks of her childhood as ‘haunted’; though, in time, she would marry, and travel far, and become a writer, yet the ghosts of childhood accompanied her and, in time, were joined by others: ‘the wistful phantoms of her unborn children.’ Perhaps this helps to explain why Mantel’s works of fiction differ so radically from one another, and why she has no single but rather singular styles, ranging from the visionary to the vernacular, the rhetoric of tragedy and the stammering speechlessness of diminished suburban lives.”

Hilary Mantel
The War Against Women

“We are faced with the perplexity inherent in all social studies, that the moneyed and educated classes command media and culture, while those of the lower social classes who make it onto the record do so because they’ve moved the social conscience of the reformer or attracted the attention of the policeman, because they’re recalcitrant or a troublemaker or a hard case, or the exception that proves the rule.”

Hilary Mantel
England, Whose England?

“What shall we expect of the middle-age of the middlebrow novelist?”

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