by
Linda Simon
 n her native England, Hilary Mantel is as acclaimed a writer as, for example, Margaret Atwood is on this side of the Atlantic, and for similar reasons: impressive versatility of form and subject matter; gracefully distilled, remarkably incisive prose; and stunningly observant characterizations. Since her first novel, Every Day Is Mother's Day, appeared in 1985, Mantel has published seven other novels; a collection of short stories, essays, reviews; and, most recently, a memoir. All have generated effusive admiration and earned Mantel some of England's most coveted literary prizes: among them, the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize (1987), the Winifred Holtby Prize (1990), and the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award (1992).
Although the settings of her fiction have been as diverse as revolutionary France, eighteenth-century Ireland and England, Saudi Arabia and Botswana in the 1960s, and contemporary Britain, Mantel has focused on a few recurring themes: the nature of evil and the problem of faith; the complexities of cultural conflict; the prescience and vulnerability of the outsider; and the connection between a woman's identity and her body. Her interest in these themes is hardly theoretical or arbitrary but instead personal and even urgent. One senses in all of her works that she is exploring unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, questions generated from the contexts and experiences of her own life.
The daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants, Hilary Mary Mantel was born on July 6, 1952, and raised in a small provincial town in the north of England. Educated at convent schools and joining a monthly processional to the church for confession, she struggled to understand her connection to a faith that seemed at once punitive and alienating. "From about the age of four," she writes in her 2003 memoir Giving Up the Ghost, "I had begun to believe I had done something wrong. Confession didn't touch some essential sin. There was something inside me that was beyond remedy and beyond redemption."
Yet instead of causing her to be self-effacing, the church inspired strategies of subversion; these strategies were especially useful, she discovered, at school. Although other girls were raised to believe they had no future better than marriage and motherhood, Mantel's parents, who felt that poor education had cheated them out of a chance to better themselves, wanted a different fate for their daughter. But for Mantel, what school offered most consistently was a "systematic crushing of any spontaneity." School, she recalls, "enforced rules that had never been articulated, and which changed as soon as you thought you grasped them. I was conscious, from the first day in the first class, of the need to resist what I found there." That resistance emerged as a sure, and unflappable, self-possession, along with a talent for dissimulation. "We must break down the barriers of deference, as Tom Paine tells us; this can be done politely, so that people don't see that you are dismantling the things and discreetly sneaking them away. My convent years left me a legacy," she says: "a nervous politeness, an appearance of feminine timidity which will probably stand me in good stead if I am ever on trial for murder."
 |  Hilary Mantel
Even at home, she needed to hone her powers of resistance to maintain a sense of independence in her unconventional family. One day, when she was still very young, a certain Jack came to visit. Soon her father moved to a room of his own; Jack stayed on and eventually replaced her father. It was as simple and as complicated as that: "You should not judge your parents," Mantel advises. "Mostly--this is the condition of parents--they were doing the best they could. They were addled and penniless and couldn't afford lawyers, they were ... pathetically young," and they wanted, especially her mother, to get a second chance at life. The new family--Hilary, her mother and Jack (who did not marry), two brothers, and a dog--moved to a semidetached house in Cheshire. "My childhood ended so, in the autumn of 1963," Mantel says; "the past and the future equally obscured by the smoke from my mother's burning boats."
The smoke from the burning boats wafted to her school, inspiring gossip among the "posh girls" who tried to bully her. But she learned, among other things, how to negotiate power for herself. By the time she was in her final year, she was voted Top Girl, an achievement in popularity that matched her academic achievement. After graduating, Mantel left home at last to study law at the London School of Economics. Her classes, she recalls, were engrossing, her tutors praised her and encouraged her to become a barrister. But lack of funds and the arrival of a boyfriend derailed those plans. She followed her high school sweetheart, Gerald McEwan, to Sheffield University, where he was studying geology, and by the time she was twenty, they married, mostly because no one would rent a flat to them unless they were legally a couple.
Although Mantel hoped to continue studying law at Sheffield, she found the atmosphere stifling and provincial. The students were "dull, hostile" and, because of their limited experiences, seemed "pitifully young." The faculty members, unlike those she had encountered in London, were sarcastic and demeaning; "one of my tutors," she recalls, "was a bored local solicitor who made it plain that he didn't think women had any place in his classroom. They were just a waste of space; they'd only go and have babies, wouldn't they?" At Sheffield, more than ever before, Mantel felt constricted and frustrated by cultural expectations for women. "Some people have forgotten, or never known," she reminds us, "why we needed the feminist movement so badly. This was why: so that some talentless prat in a nylon shirt couldn't patronize you, while around you the spotty boys smirked and giggled, trying to worm into his favour." Faculty and potential employers assumed that a woman would marry, thereby ending her intellectual life, and devote herself to "swelling and simpering and knitting bootees." And this condescension extended to the medical profession as well, as Mantel, distressingly, learned.
Biology as destiny
 eginning when she was in her early twenties, Mantel's life was defined by illness: debilitating, painful, and, for too long, misdiagnosed.
Nauseated, exhausted, suffering from shooting pains in her legs and abdomen, Mantel presented herself to doctors who had no idea of the cause. Because they could find nothing organic wrong with her, they decided that her ailments must be psychosomatic. "I could believe this," she says, "and wanted my mind fixed." Not surprisingly, the first psychiatrist she saw diagnosed her problem as "stress, caused by overambition." Wouldn't she be happier, he offered, working in a dress shop rather than studying law? Or serving as a solicitor's assistant, copying, filing, and delivering documents? When Mantel became even more depressed under his care, he suggested that she might spend some time in the university's clinic and be treated with stronger and stronger antidepressants and then antipsychotics; these drugs, though, exacerbated her symptoms, creating an "uprush of killing fear" and "hammering heart" and unbearable anxiety. Since the drug-induced symptoms mirrored those with which she had been diagnosed, her physician naturally concluded that she was getting worse and prescribed even stronger drugs. Only after being discharged from the clinic--when the university term ended, her right to be treated ended, too--did she manage to regain her sanity by stopping her medication, cold turkey.
For the next three years, she suffered in relative silence, or at least refused medical intervention. She accompanied her husband to Africa for his research; only after her pain became unbearable did she decide to go to a library in the capital and comb through medical books to try to understand what was happening to her body. Endometriosis, she discovered, matched her various and excruciating symptoms. In 1979, she underwent a hysterectomy, hoping, at last, for relief. Without her womb, without her ovaries, she found that physical pain was excised but her emotional pain intensified: she struggled to redefine her sense of herself as a woman. She would never have children, not even the freedom to decide whether or not to become pregnant. "My own choices, as it turned out, were sharply curtailed. Biology has determined the way I've lived my life," she wrote in the Guardian in March 8, 2003, "just as it did for my great-grandmother," illiterate, poor, and the mother of ten. Mantel had been castrated; and castration, she knew, "is a punishment." But what had been her crime? And if she was no longer able to breed, what could she do? "Who was I at all," she asked herself.
 | Selected works by Hilary Mantel.
That question was exacerbated in the next few years. When pain returned, hormones were prescribed as treatment, and Mantel, who had always been thin, began to gain massive amounts of weight. Suddenly she felt as if she had become "an unwilling stranger in my own body." Writing, which she had begun during her first stay at the university clinic, became a way of claiming her identity, and writing about herself--in Giving Up the Ghost and in the autobiographical stories of Learning to Talk--a way "to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; ... to locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are. ... I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being."
Steps to literature
 antel's first manuscript, however, did not draw upon her life. Instead, she immersed herself in research about the French Revolution, taking with her to Botswana piles of notes and stacks of index cards. As her husband conducted geological research, she sat inside a mosquito net, documenting the fall of the French monarchy. By the end of their stay in Africa, she had produced a huge manuscript. But after she returned to London, she found that it was not easy to find a publisher for the book she titled A Place of Greater Safety.
Yet writing had become a necessity, a compulsion: "When you have committed enough words to paper," she says, "you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing you find that's all you are, a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen." She kept writing, and before A Place of Greater Safety finally appeared in 1992, Mantel had established her reputation with four other novels: Every Day Is Mother's Day (1985) and Vacant Possession (1986), satirical thrillers about a macabre mother-daughter relationship; Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), about a Western woman's disorientation in the Middle East, based on her own experiences in Saudi Arabia in 1982, when she again accompanied her husband for his research; and Fludd (1989), the tale of a stranger--perhaps an angel or the devil himself--who arrives in a small moorland village and changes the lives of some of its troubled inhabitants.
With A Change of Climate (1994), Mantel's fiction took another turn, becoming at once more political and more personal. A book the New Yorker called "magnificent" and the New York Times Book Review deemed "disturbing and memorable ... smart, astringent, and marvelously upsetting," it considers Ralph and Anna Eldred, recently returned from apartheid South Africa, where they had administered a church mission. Ralph took the post initially to flee from his domineering father, who forbade him to pursue a career in geology. Both he and Anna struggle to justify their good works in the context of a religion from which they feel increasingly distant and a political situation that increasingly sees them as part of an endemic problem of colonialism. After they are forced out of South Africa, they accept a remote post in Botswana. Here, too, they become victims of political discontent and unrest. A digruntled servant abducts their infant twins; only one, the girl, is ever found, and Ralph and Anna flee to the safety of home. They decide to keep the tragedy a secret from their daughter and from the children they have after they return. But the disappearance of their son, whose murderers harvested his body parts to sell on the black market, shapes the rest of their lives, as they confront their feelings about loss, self-sacrifice, responsibility, and, most essentially, love. Like Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, A Change of Climate is about the complex intersection of the personal and political; like Fludd, it is about the ambiguity of identifying good and evil.
An Experiment in Love (1995) draws upon Mantel's experiences as a law student in London and a woman whose body becomes her enemy. Carmel is eighteen, newly installed in a residence hall at London University. It is 1970, and feminism is both a problem and a promise for young women, especially those raised within the Catholic Church. Here, Mantel confronts most explicitly the relationship of a woman's identity to her body; Carmel's story focuses on her physicality; it is a story "about flesh," Carmel tells us, "about the bodies that contained our minds. On the whole," she adds, "during the years when we were educated, we were persuaded into thinking that bodies were an encumbrance, a necessary evil." But newly unleashed ideas about women's sexuality and aspirations, new mandates that women grasp opportunities and exercise freedom, ask women to change their ideas about their bodies and their physical needs. Carmel becomes anorexic under this pressure, and yet, she cautions, hers is not a story about anorexia. "Let us say then it is a story about appetite: appetite in its many aspects and dimensions, its perversions and falling off, its strange reversals and refusals." It is a story that ends in tragedy for one woman but ultimately survival for Carmel, who manages to save herself: to love, to persist, and, finally, to allow herself the pleasure of nourishment.
Perhaps the most brilliant of Mantel's explorations of the body is The Giant, O'Brien (1998). The central character is based on the historical figure of an eight-foot Irishman who eked out a living exhibiting himself in London in the late eighteenth century; in Mantel's imagination, Charlie O'Brien is both gentle and introspective, a poet of a giant: sensitive, philosophical, and yearning for love and understanding. He takes the opportunity to exhibit himself not out of pride but humility: it is 1782, and Ireland is starving and eerily silent. "It was the hush of famine," Mantel writes, "the calm that comes when bad temper is spent, the gnawing pain has ebbed and there is nothing ahead but weakness, swelling, low fever and the strange growth of hair."
O'Brien consents to be managed by the wily Joe Vance, a self-proclaimed impresario; but his fate is more threatened by the ambitious Scottish surgeon John Hunter--also a historical figure--who employs grave robbers to furnish him with the corpses he needs to further his research. When Hunter learns that O'Brien is likely to die soon (the giant starts growing, apparently a sign of imminent death), he tries to make a deal to buy his body. But Charlie is convinced that this act against God will mean his soul will be barred from heaven. That is a fate, he feels, worse than death itself. "The poet has his memorial in repetition, and the statesman in stone and bronze," Charlie reflects sadly. "The scholar's hand lies always on his book. ... But for the poor man and the giant there is the scrub-bed wooden slab and the slop bucket, there is the cauldron and the boiling pot, and the dunghill for his lights; so he is stench in the nose for a day or a week, so he is a no-name, so he is oblivion. Stories cannot save him."
As a writer, of course, Mantel has invested in the power of stories to save, to redeem, to illuminate. Words can pay homage to a life; words can reshape a body; words can cherish ghosts, even the ghosts of her own unborn children. "What's to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?" she asks in her memoir. Nothing better than to write about them, however inadequate that enterprise sometimes seems: "What is this dim country, what is this tenuous path I lose so often--where am I trying to get to, when the light is so uncertain?" Mantel asks. "Steps to Literature, I think; I have tottered one or two." Her next novel is due out early this year.
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College and a frequent contributor to The World & I.
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