Mantel’s Essays for The Times
“Hilary Mantel on Taking Her ‘Wolf Hall’ Novels to the Stage” (2015)
What is it like for an author to shepherd her story onto the stage? In 2015, Mantel wrote about, as she put it, starting to “build a theater inside my head.” This is an account of how the “Wolf Hall” novels made it to Stratford-on-Avon, then to Broadway. As she wrote: “Snipped from the record, processed into a novel, recycled into script, sieved through 10 drafts, through 20, they stick because they’re the best words. The dead are speaking to us, hand on our arm.”
“I Taught Shakespeare in Botswana” (2012)
In 2012, Mantel contributed a tart, honest and witty essay about working as an English teacher in Botswana in the 1970s. She moved there with her geologist husband when she was 25, and she ended up in a classroom after another instructor failed to materialize. She wrote, “Today, my pupils from 1978 are never out of my thoughts: a boy called Justice, a girl called Tears.”
Mantel’s Writing for the Book Review
Incidents in the Rue Laugier, by Anita Brookner (1996)
In this novel, a woman tries to reconstruct her dead mother’s emotional history using a handful of objects — a pink kimono, a notebook with cryptic scribblings. The story begins “warily,” Mantel writes, “as if the business of storytelling might be an infringement of good manners.”
After Hannibal, by Barry Unsworth (1997)
“Barry Unsworth’s latest novel is a sad comedy of cheats and fools,” Mantel wrote, “a story of unbounded beauty and blighted hopes, of multiple and layered betrayals, ‘a regression of falsehoods and deceptions going back through all the generations to the original agreement, God’s pact with Adam.’”
Down by the River, by Edna O’Brien (1997)
“This is powerful material, and Ms. O’Brien has apparently decided her prose must rise to it. The reader may feel some initial queasiness,” Mantel wrote. Her criticism is scalpel sharp, delivered with a crisp bedside manner.
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