![]() In the novels, Mantel is reimagining the small-scale squalor of her parents’ domestic arrangements on a large scale, as consequential history. Sometimes a phrase or sentiment from the memoir is lifted virtually unchanged into the novels, as when Mantel’s mother and Jack, like Henry and Anne, are described as “ couple who had endured, to be together, so much adverse public opinion.” Cross-referencing Mantel’s memoir with the novels, the reader encounters the same clusters of descriptors again and again, shared out among Mantel’s mother, Jack, and Anne Boleyn, or among Cromwell, Mantel herself as a child, and Cromwell’s small daughter, Anne. But Mantel’s mother is also Boleyn: small and catlike in her movements, unscrupulous and shape-shifting. Mantel’s mother, of course, is Henry, the books’ capricious, death-dealing sovereign, and Jack is Anne Boleyn, the sallow Protestant parvenu. She is also Elizabeth, another unwanted but ultimately triumphant (if sterile) daughter who, at a stroke, lost a parent (Anne Boleyn) as a child. Mantel’s early experiences explain not only her richly ambivalent attitude toward her Tudor characters, but also her impressive “negative capability” as their artist-her ability, that is, out of the small circle of her original family, either to play or to cast all the parts.įor example, she herself is Mary, the king’s awkwardly placed oldest daughter who is banished from his presence together with a rejected, painfully dignified spouse (Katherine of Aragon). In her novels about Cromwell, all of Mantel’s formative issues are in play: the plot-driving engine of marital unhappiness divorce and the impossibility of divorce ambiguous sexual situations the desirability but also the powerlessness of children. Even so bare an outline of Mantel’s life, drawn from her 2003 memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, makes clear the connections between Mantel’s biographical backstory and the goings-on at Henry VIII’s court. Psychoanalytic criticism may have fallen out of favor, but it has not ceased to be useful. But she was also ill, underwent a hysterectomy, and mourned-belatedly and protractedly-her failure to have a child. ![]() Helped by these footholds, Mantel escaped to university, married, and began to write, ultimately fulfilling her early ambition (“to distinguish myself in my generation”). There was a name change there were better schools and upward mobility. In Cheshire, Mantel’s mother and Jack pretended to be married. Mantel’s father disappeared she never saw him again. When Mantel was eleven, her mother and Jack moved with the children to nearby Cheshire. ![]() Another boy was born, who years later so resembled Mantel’s father that Mantel belatedly realized her mother had been sleeping with both men. ![]() When their Catholic marriage foundered, at a time when divorce was out of the question for Catholics, the mother took a lover, a jaundiced Protestant named Jack, who moved into her bedroom while her husband moved to another bedroom down the hall, a room he shared with his daughter, Hilary. Her mother was narcissistic and socially ambitious her father quiet, bookish, and ineffectual. When Mantel was a child, she lived with her parents and a baby brother in an inhospitable village in the north of England, where, among the children of the village, the wars of the Reformation were still being waged. In Mantel’s case, when she began writing about Cromwell, by her own account she was “filled with glee and a sense of power,” a conviction that everything in her life had prepared her for this. Psychologically persuasive and prodigiously self-assured, they are examples of what can happen when an artist, who has been honing her craft in the meantime, finds or invents material that turns out to be the perfect vehicle for her powers. Anathema to many Catholics on account of their sympathetic portrayal of Cromwell, the books have been runaway bestsellers, were awarded the Booker Prize (twice), and have been successfully adapted for both stage and screen. By now, everyone who reads contemporary fiction will have heard of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed historical novels about Thomas Cromwell, the powerful advisor to Henry VIII who all but single-handedly disestablished the Catholic Church in England. ![]()
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