In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, 'I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.' This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades, tells the story of what happened next.
Her subjects range far and wide: Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia where she lived for four years in the 1980s, the Bulger case, John Osborne, the Virgin Mary as well as the pop icon Madonna, a brilliant examination of Helen Duncan, Britain's last witch. There are essays about Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, Christopher Marlowe and Margaret Pole, which display the astonishing insight into the Tudor mind we are familiar with from the bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy. Her famous lecture, 'Royal Bodies', which caused a media frenzy, explores the place of royal women in society and our imagination. Here too are some of her LRB diaries, including her first meeting with her stepfather and a confrontation with a circus strongman.
Constantly illuminating, always penetrating and often very funny, interleaved with letters and other ephemera gathered from the archive, Mantel Pieces is an irresistible selection from one of our greatest living writers.
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WHEN my first novel, Every Day Is Mother's Day, was published in 1985, I had been living abroad for some years.
INTRODUCTION
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(@4thEstateBooks, 1 October 2020, 352 pages, hardback, bought from @AmazonUK)
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Hilary Mantel has become one of my favourite writers over the past few years. I've read most of her fiction and wanted to see what her non-fiction is like. Her style in the essays and reviews contained here is very similar to her fiction. As a book lover, blogger and reviewer I enjoyed her book reviews the best. I also liked the fact there are copies of letters, memos and emails scattered throughout the book. The stand-out pieces for me were American Marriage 1988, In Bed with Madonna 1992, On Christopher Marlowe 1992, On Marie Antoinette 1999 and the dazzling Royal Bodies 2013.
