Hilary Mantel obituary: prizewinning author who brought history alive in her novels

• Published date: 01 October 2022

Died: September 22nd, 2022

Hilary Mantel, one of Britain's most decorated novelists, whose trilogy of books on the life of Thomas Cromwell — Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light — received critical acclaim and commercial success, landing on best-seller lists around the world, died on September 22nd at a hospital in Exeter, England. She was 70.

Mantel, the author of 17 books, twice won Britain's Booker Prize for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both of which sold millions of copies. She was longlisted for the same prize, for The Mirror and the Light, in 2020. The novels led to popular stage and screen adaptations.

But it was a long and arduous road to reach those heights, beginning with a tough childhood. "I was unsuited to being a child," Mantel wrote in a 2003 memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. She endured numerous health problems, leading one doctor to call her "Little Miss Neverwell". The doctor was the first of many to fail to properly treat her.

Her illnesses later proved so debilitating that she could not hold down regular jobs, steering her to writing. But even then it was a writer's life of fits and starts. Mainstream success did not come to her until she was well into her 50s.

Her Cromwell books were the turning point. Enraptured critics said she had presented the historical novel as high literature, portraying her subjects not as cardboard characters from centuries past but as real people of contradictions and psychological complexity, relatable in any age. And readers were carried along by her storytelling power.

Mantel was born Hilary Mary Thompson on July 6th, 1952, to Henry and Margaret Thompson in Glossop, a village in Derbyshire, and grew up in an Irish Catholic family. She said she was strongly influenced by her Irish ancestry. "My parents were both born in England, but the generation that shaped me was the one before that, and I was conscious of belonging to an Irish family," she said. "We were northern, working-class and Catholic, and to me, Englishness was Protestant and southern, and owned by people with more money."

Her mother was a school secretary. When her mother left her husband and moved the family in with Jack Mantel, an engineer, Hilary took her stepfather's surname.

At 18 she moved to London to study law at the London School of Economics but she could not afford to finish her training. After marrying Gerald McEwen, a geologist, she became a teacher and started writing on the side.

Mantel did not achieve...