Hilary Mantel (1952–2022)

Her early life as a novelist was not an income. The advance for her first novel was £2000. [Every Day Is Mother's Day, 1985] She needed work to subsidise the slow process of writing fiction and it was to the periodicals she turned. She didn't feel qualified to do anything else. Auburon Waugh offered her a piece a month for the Literary Review for £40 a time. She wrote for Alan Ross at the London Magazine, but he paid her even less. (p.xii)

• The Day is for Leaving


• The Iron Maiden


• Silence Grips the Town


• Can These Bones Live?


• Adaptation, in which she explores the pros and cons of stage and screen compared to story.

St Augustine says, the dead are invisible, they are not absent. You needn't believe in ghosts to see that's true. We carry the genes and the culture of our ancestors, and what we think about them shapes what we think of ourselves, and how we make of our times and place. Are these good times, bad times, interesting times? We rely on history to tell us. History, and science too, help us put our small lives in context. But if we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art. (p.241)

Commemoration is an active process, and often a contentious one. When we memorialise the dead, we are sometimes desperate for the truth, and sometimes for a comforting illusion. We remember individually, out of grief and need. We remember as a society, with a political agenda — we reach into the past for foundation myths of our tribe, our nation, and found them on glory, or found them on grievance, but we seldom found them on cold facts.

Nations are built on wishful versions of their origins: stories in which our forefathers were giants, of one kind or another. This is how we live in the world: romancing. Once the romance was about aristocratic connections and secret status, the fantasy of being part of an elite. Now the romance is about deprivation, dislocation, about the distance covered between there and here... (p.244)