Time.news – With the passing of Hilary Mantel, British and world literature is orphaned of one of the most brilliant contemporary signatures of the historical novel genrebut not only, made famous for his epic trilogy dedicated to the England of the Tudors, Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, translated into 41 languages and with more than 5 million copies sold.
The death of the famous 70-year-old writer was a stroke, as confirmed by Bill Hamilton, his longtime literary agent, and his publishing house, HarperCollins. “He has seen and heard things that we mere mortals lacked”: were the first words spoken by Hamilton, giving the news that Mantel died “suddenly and peacefully”.
After Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, she is often presented as the third most important woman in English literature. Born in Glossop, Derbyshire, on 6 July 1952, Dame Hilary Mary Mantel was one of the most awarded writers in her homeland: she is the first to have been awarded the prestigious Booker Prize twice.
In 2009 he received it for “Wolf Hall”, a fictional biography of Thomas Cromwell’s rapid rise to power, 1st Earl of Essex in the court of Henry VIII of England, set between 1500 and 1535.
The same title also won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the “Narrative” section.
“Wolf Hall” is the first title of his Tudor trilogy – published in Italy by Fazi Editore – followed by “Anna Bolena, una materia di famiglia” (Bring Up the Bodies) of 2012, also winner of the Booker Prize, and finally in 2020 from “The mirror and the light”.
The latter title was immediately the number one best-seller of fiction, selected for the Booker Prize 2020 and winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Behind it has a training as a lawyer, with a course of study at the London School of Economics and the University of Sheffieldas well as a long experience as a social worker in a geriatric hospital.
In the 1972 she married the geologist Gerald McEwen, from whom she divorced in 1981 and then remarry with him the following year. In 1974 you started writing a novel on the “Secret History of the French Revolution”, which was then published in 1992, the same year as “A safer place” and “Days of terror”.
In 1977, Mantel and her husband moved to Botswana, where they lived for five years. The couple subsequently spent four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Great Britain in the mid-1980s. In all Mantel has signed 17 works, including “Every Day is Mother’s Day” (1985), “Vacant Possession” (1986), “Eight months in Ghazzah Street” (1988), “Father Fludd” (1989). To follow in 1994 “A Change of Climate”, the following year “An experiment of love”, in 1998 “The giant O’Brien and in 2005” Beyond the black “.
In 2006 she was awarded the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire “For Services to Literature” and in 2014, with the same motivation, she received the title of Dama Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
One thing is certain: for Mantel, success and recognition took place until the age of 60, after a long series of books that will certainly be rediscovered and after an illness that caused her long suffering: endometriosis. Mantel raised the curtain on his life in 2003, the year in which her memoirs entitled “The ghosts of a life”, recently published also in Italy, came out.
For once at the center of his writing are not the historical sagas but the story of his life, condensed into 234 pages of joys, pains, sufferings, settings, ages, obstacles, nostalgia and removals, from childhood to illness.
The writer spoke about endometriosis in several interviews, the first time in 2012 in a released to the Times, in which she told years of fighting against excruciating pain, misunderstanding, wrong treatments, disabling side effects.
A long suffering that she deepened in her memoirs: the moment in which ‘her’ ghosts became concrete, painful and merciless was the surgery she underwent at St George’s Hospital in London, which, still very young, prevented her from becoming a mother. .
His writing is empathic and profound both when he narrates the history of his country and his personal history, but Mantel never stayed in her ivory tower as a writer.
She has often exposed herself in the first person with strong and direct statements to the media on issues and problems that affect her closely, as a human being, as a citizen.
Thus, after the UK’s exit from the European Union he said to wanting to become Irish in order to remain European.
Its strong positioning against Brexit and, on several occasions, against the British monarchy, establishing historical parallels between the England of the Tudors and that of the Windsors.
Indeed in September 2021 Mantel claimed to believe that Prince George, eldest son of Prince of Wales William and his wife Kate, he will never be crowned king as the royal family could be dead within two generations. Certainly with the death of Elizabeth II, last September 8, an era ended after a reign that lasted 70 years.
And today, with Mantel’s premature death, a very important chapter in British literature closes, leaving a precious historical and human legacy.