Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books

In 1987, Hilary Mantel was a published novelist, with two books under her belt. But she wasn’t a famous one yet and though she had received a respectable advance on her second novel, it wasn’t enough to live on. She writes: “Apart from my agent and publishers, I didn’t know anyone in the media, or a single other person who was a writer. [She had just returned from four years living in Saudi Arabia.] But I didn’t think I was equipped for any other trade.” Auberon Waugh threw her a lifeline: would she be interested in writing one piece a month for the Literary Review? The pay was forty pounds per piece. Part-time employment at the London Magazine followed and then a weekly film column for the Spectator. It wasn’t always easy writing reviews in the early days. “It is simple, if you only have a paragraph to spare, to swat a book like a fly. Young writers become fired with zeal against the established and over-rated. They think they are doing justice, but it takes them longer to learn about mercy.” The next year, she began writing for the London Review of Books, with the Times Literary Supplement the best journal reviewing books in the United Kingdom, and her new (still occasional) job came the editor she needed –sensible and steady, but also advising her when she felt she needed advice, even bending deadlines a bit. First it was Karl Miller but for most of her stay there (129088 to the present), it was Mary Kay Wilmers. In this collection of occasional pieces –reviews of books, reflections on history (especially the eras on which, in her exceptional historical novels, she has shown her knowledge, Henry VIII’s and Elizabeth’s England, Danton and Robespierre’s Revolutionary France), reminiscences about her own growing up- she shows her gratitude to her editor by interposing a letter to or from Wilmer between each essay. All of the essays in this book are engaging but several stood out. She does two brilliant hatchet jobs, one on Sherri Hite’s socio-babble Hite and the other on what a truly awful man the “angry young man” playwright John Osborne was and how dreadful most of his later writings were. On the Hite Reports –there are two, one on female sexuality and the other on male sexuality), she comments: “The truth may be that The Hite Report is science, but not of the mould-breaking sort its author thinks it is; that is in fact it’s just the usual kind, which offers incomprehensible explanations for what everyone knows. Sociology has never made it into the gentleman’s club of the ‘hard’ sciences; many people have suspected that it is simply a higher form of gossip. … The book’s tone is homogeneous, dull, flat; all those thousands of women sound like one woman, one awful person, droning on.” Madonna doesn’t fare much better in Mantel’s review of Christopher Anderson’s Madonna Unauthorised. The title of the review is “Plain Girl’s Revenge Made Flesh.” She writes that the book is “full of names of people who were forgotten by the time they reached the page. … Madonna … is no nurturer of other people’s reputations.” There is a thoughtful piece on poet-playwright Christopher Marlowe, and whether we will ever be able to sort out what happened when he was killed in a tavern brawl in 1593 –not how he was killed, we know that, stabbed through his eyeball with a dagger—but why, what back game was being played at that moment in that small, backward country where spying was almost a cottage industry. There is a fascinating review discussion of Roman Catholic exaltation of female saints (“The Hair Shirt Sisterhood”), a piece on Marie Antoinette that precludes her later argument about royal women seen as racks to put fancy dress on rather than as full human beings. Marie A. morphs into Princess Diana and Kate Middleton in her 2013 essay, “Royal Bodies,” an essay for which she got flack. There are concise, insightful pieces on minor (the Revolution’s Theroigne de Mericourt, Henry VIII’s Charles Brandon) and major (Robespierre, Danton), Margaret Pole) historical figures. Throughout the historical essays are scattered just right judgments that are all the better because so concise and crisply worded. There are also pieces about Mantel’s own life –“Bookcase Shopping in Jeddah,” “Meeting My Stepfather,” “Meeting the Devil” (on recuperating from an operation that was went awry, and the lengthy and painful recuperation that followed). Over all, the judgment is clear: Hilary Mantel is as talented and intelligent an essay writer as she is a historical novelist, and as the latter, she has no competitor –well, possibly Patrick O’Brian –over the past hundred some years.

well it is well written but the essays are really more for an UK audience as there are national stories we Americans aren\’t familiar with

whatever she writes is worth reading. A remarkable talent.

Lovely writing, but some of it is a little dense for American readers who enjoyed the author’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy.

Can’t really conclude a review without mentioning you can only listen to it once! That is a super bad surprise.

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