Hilary Mantel and her Legacy

By AJ Birt, Third Year History

On the 22nd September 2022, Hilary Mantel, author of the Wolf Hall trilogy, passed away aged 70. Her historical fiction won her the Booker prize twice - only the third author ever to do such a thing. 

However, she was not just a novelist. Mantel was an essayist and a speaker as well. She stirred up controversy for her comments on the monarchy, and her book The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher garnered Conservative outrage. Mantel, like many, did not speak fondly of Thatcher, declaring ‘I loathed her’. One can argue that this liberal leaning helped lend her fiction a uniquely human, social-history-style perspective.

Mantel’s left-wing attitudes did not stop at writing fiction. Her interaction with history in a public sphere has been incredibly influential. We can link her attitude to the likes of E P Thompson and Madge Dresser, believing that people made history. However, her role as a popular author embodies that which academic historians cannot bring to public history - a true engagement with the public.

Reviewers and readers of Mantel’s books will know that her focus is on the individual in her stories. She brings them to life, centering the plot around decisions made by the characters, and ultimately humanising people who are long dead. Whilst this is not quite bottom-up history (whilst Mantel focuses on revolutionaries, her series Wolf Hall focuses on one of the ‘great men’ of the Tudor era - Thomas Cromwell) it is certainly social. 

Her methods of writing in the present tense made her stories vibrant and gave the characters an energy we do not find on the pages of the history books. The adaptation of Wolf Hall to the screen further engaged the public with an otherwise stuffy, political history. 

The success of Mantel’s works - two out of the three Wolf Hall books won the Booker prize, with the third being longlisted for it - can be argued to be a perfect example of a successful public history project. However, unlike the historian, as a novelist Mantel could fill in the gaps in history. She was allowed a bit of creative licence. This was not to the detriment of the facts, instead further fleshing out those who live on only in records. 

And now, thanks to Mantel, many live on in the public consciousness as well.