Do we like Hilary Mantel?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent record, kind to other writers and clear on migrants, with one contested position on the Rowling row and a famously savage pen.
Hilary Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, in 1952 into an Irish Catholic, northern, working-class family. She started studying law at the London School of Economics but couldn't afford to finish, then taught while she wrote on the side. Her first novel, A Place of Greater Safety, was turned down at first, so this was no overnight job.
Mainstream fame arrived in 2009 with Wolf Hall, the first of her Thomas Cromwell books, which sold over five million copies and was translated into 41 languages. She won the Booker twice, for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and was made a dame in 2015. She wrote 17 books in all, and died in September 2022 aged 70.
Her big stoush came in 2013, when a British Museum lecture described the Duchess of Cambridge as a “plastic princess” and a “jointed doll”. The tabloids went feral. Mantel told BBC radio she had “absolutely nothing to apologise for” and said she'd been made a “hate figure”. Defenders read it as a critique of how royal women are packaged; critics read it as cruelty.
A year later her short story about an IRA sniper plotting to kill Margaret Thatcher had Tory MPs calling her “sick and deranged”, and a former Thatcher adviser said police should investigate. In an interview she spoke of her “boiling detestation” of Thatcher, and used a term, “psychological transvestite”, that reads badly today. It's fiction and political invective, not an attack on any minority, but it shows how savage she could be.
On the harm check, the record is mostly on the right side. In 2021 she said she was ashamed of the UK government's treatment of refugees and planned to “become a European again”. The catch is Rowling: asked about the row, she called the online attacks on her “unjustified and shameful”. She also said she didn't want her “womanhood confiscated in print”. We found no campaigning against trans people from her, but that comment is the asterisk.
On the good side, tributes at her 2023 memorial celebrated her riotous humour and her generosity to other writers. A writer's reaction to the Guardian's editorial on her death, and other tributes, say the same. That's the Mantel her peers describe, and it is a long way from the tabloid caricature.