“What might she have written next?” asked Margaret Atwood in her tribute to Hilary Mantel, after the Booker prize-winning novelist’s sudden death in September last year. “I don’t know, but I will miss it.” In this, she spoke for readers around the world, eagerly awaiting a new book from the author of the Wolf Hall trilogy. Aside from her Cromwell novels, Mantel had a habit of confounding expectations, with each new work so different from its predecessor.
We now know the answer to Atwood’s question: Mantel was working on a rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, told from the perspective of the overlooked middle sister Mary Bennet, to be titled Provocation. Even more intriguingly, it was planned as a mischievous Austen mashup, with characters from all her novels making an appearance in unfamiliar guises. From 2,000 pages of bloody Tudor pageantry to Austen’s two-inches of ivory, it is a dizzying shift in scale. “I think she thought, ‘I can just have a whole load of fun,’” says her long-term agent, Bill Hamilton. “She felt that it was time to get away from the really serious research and the big historical novels, to do something lighter.”
Mantel had written 20,000 words of Provocation, but the two brief paragraphs published here, read at her memorial in Southwark Cathedral this week, are the only ones Gerald McEwen, Mantel’s husband, felt were finished enough to share with the world. The rest, along with around 150 A5 notebooks, have been sent to the Huntington Library in California, where her archive is kept. (Mantel was close friends with the Huntington’s now retired curator of British historical manuscripts Mary Robertson, with whom she was in constant contact.) No one will be able to read the notebooks – divided into manuscript notes and personal diaries – until after McEwen’s death.
Mantel would leave notebooks and diaries all over the flat in Budleigh Salterton, Devon, where the couple lived for 12 years, but they had an honourable agreement that McEwen would never read them. It was only after she died that he opened the last one. It was written around the time of the Queen’s death, after which Mantel was inundated with requests from newspapers. She was planning a long piece, a follow-up to Royal Bodies, her controversial 2013 essay for the London Review of Books (in it, she described Kate Middleton as a “jointed doll on which certain rags are hung”). McEwen was always her first reader. She would turn to him not for literary criticism, she said, but for his “reaction as a human being” to her work in progress. He is keeping that final notebook, he says, “because it contains all kinds of stuff, which I wouldn’t want to be out there, even after I’m dead. It’s just too private.”
Mantel died at 6 o’clock on the 22nd of September, McEwen says carefully, when we speak on the phone ahead of the memorial. They had been cleaning the flat because they were moving to Ireland. He went to take some bags to the recycling centre, and when he came back she had collapsed after a massive stroke from which she never recovered. “My last words to her were, ‘I won’t be long.’” Had she survived until midnight, he says, they would have been celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. Four days later, they would have left for their new home in Kinsale, Ireland. “We were ready to move, all the removals and things were sorted. We were just tidying up.”
Both Mantel and McEwen were of Irish-Catholic descent, although they met as teenagers in Cheshire, where they grew up. (McEwen tells a good story about their first date in a pub in Manchester. It was raided by the police looking for underage drinkers – Mantel was six months shy of 18. This led to a second date at the local police station. His relationship with her parents got off to a bad start, “and deteriorated from there,” he jokes.) The proposed move to Ireland was in part an attempt to reclaim their European citizenship post-Brexit; they had spent many holidays in Cork and “had just fallen in love with the place”. Shortly after the funeral, McEwen packed up the car with a few essentials and headed to the house in Kinsale. He camped on the floor on a yoga mat for one night, but it was so uncomfortable that he spent the next four nights in a hotel. “After the four days, I decided that although it was a lovely house, I didn’t want to live there by myself.”
The planned move to Ireland “gave her permission to look sardonically back across the Irish sea,” Hamilton says of her decision to turn to Austen for her next novel. “To take another English icon and do with it what she pleased.”
While her writing on the nation led her to become a national treasure, Dame Hilary Mantel was also something of an iconoclast. Just as she decided “to march on to the middle ground of English history and plant a flag”, as she put it, in daring a fictional account of the reign of Henry VIII, so she was planning on marching into the middle ground of English literature and planting another less blood-stained one. In some ways our cultural map is dotted with Mantel flags: “She’s done it with royalty in her journalism, she’s done it with Catholicism in Fludd and she’s done it with the nightmares of suburban life in Beyond Black,” Hamilton says. “I think this was an open door.”
At first glance the “light, bright and sparkling” romance of Pride and Prejudice seems a world away from the dark, brutal and labyrinthine Tudor politics of Wolf Hall; and po-faced Mary, whose one big moment in the novel is a humiliating performance at the piano, seems an unlikely successor to Henry VIII’s right-hand man. And yet Mary Bennet, “the only plain one in the family”, and Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son from Putney, were both outsiders, like Mantel herself. As Hamilton says, “She was an outsider within her family, within her home town, within her religion, within England, and that gave her this extraordinary fresh perspective on absolutely everything.”
From her early 20s, Mantel shared Cromwell’s “seething ambition” and desire to impose himself on the world, opting, given her ill health (Mantel suffered with severe endometriosis throughout her life), for the rather less ruthless means of writing: “I needed to be somebody,” she said in an interview in 2003. And like Mary she had spent many years being overshadowed by noisier peers (Martin Amis, Ian McEwan et al, “the lads” as she called them), “a niche product” on the literary scene, critically acclaimed but without the big sales and profiles, “very much a minority interest”.
She had always been a devoted Austenite, and Pride and Prejudice was her favourite of all the novels (McEwen prefers Emma). Of course, she isn’t the first to assay an Austen revision or sequel – in fact, Mary has had at least six spin-offs to her name in recent years. But Mantel never came across one that satisfied her. “She thought, ‘Well, you know what, I think I can do a better job,’” McEwen laughs. As with A Place of Greater Safety, about the French Revolution, she had run out of books to read on the subject, so she decided to write one herself.
She had been working on the new novel for about six months, which, Hamilton says, “probably means she had been thinking about it for five years”. She was infuriated by the cosiness of the Austen industry, he explains, the glossing over of the underlying social awkwardness and Austen’s spiky wit in the endless TV and film remakes. “I just think she thought, ‘I can make this really funny and I can fill in gaps.’”
Austen’s admirers “snuggle up and pat her on the head”, she wrote in a piece in the New York Review of Books as far back as 1998, entitled Not Everybody’s Dear Jane. “Her work was appropriated for social conservatism. It indulged a long sentimentality about a more orderly world, a world of decorum, grace.” Twenty years later, Mantel set out to topple the accepted wisdom of her fiction, that “men set the standards to which women must rise”.
The universally acknowledged truth she boots out the door from the off is that Mr Darcy, literature’s favourite strong, silent type, is such a catch. “This led me to question, in due course, whether Darcy himself were in command of any significant intellectual power,” she sallies in the third line. The Darcy who emerges from this wickedly acidic opening paragraph is not so much Colin Firth in a wet shirt, as a damp squib with nothing to say. “His silence in company proceeded, not from a conviction of natural superiority, but from a solid, sterling stupidity, such as an English gentleman alone dares display.” A “sort of Jacob Rees-Mogg figure”, McEwen suggests, although more benign. Clearly, the novel wasn’t to be called Provocation for nothing.
John Mullan, the author of What Matters in Jane Austen and one of the Booker judging panel in 2009 when Wolf Hall won, observes that, along with Austen’s “sheer precision in her use of words”, Mantel also shared her “trust in the ingenuity of her readers. Her work in progress imagines a reader who already understands Pride and Prejudice very well.”
Immersing herself in Austen also meant returning to the 18th century, with which she had been obsessed as a teenager. “I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian,” she told the Paris Review in 2015.
While she might claim that she never set out to be a writer, she began an apprenticeship from a very early age. Feeling alienated from her family (her mother removed Hilary and her brothers from their home in the mill town of Glossop in Derbyshire, to live with her lover, Jack Mantel, in Cheshire: she never saw her father again); the Roman Catholic faith in which she had been brought up; and even her body, which was already turning against her, Mantel retreated into books. A “hyperconscious” and analytical reader, she “was never simply absorbing stories but always asking myself, how is this done?” When other girls might be daydreaming or worrying about homework, she would “do” the weather on her walk to school every morning, not stopping until she had “one perfect paragraph”, an exercise which left her with “a huge mental file of weather” that she could draw on when she started writing in earnest.
A few months after Mantel died, McEwen received an email from an old school friend of hers, Veronica Snowball, from Harrytown Convent school in the village of Romiley. She had been clearing out old boxes and came across a school yearbook that contained a piece of writing by Hilary. Entitled “A death in the morning” and written when she was 11, it has all the nascent Mantel hallmarks: clear, precise sentences; her delight in storytelling; and a sympathy for the hunted, the unlikely hero in this case a wily fox. “You can absolutely feel it was Hilary gearing up,” Hamilton says of the piece.
Although Mantel’s pen was at its sharpest on the subject of royalty, McEwen was also touched to receive a handwritten letter from Camilla, the Queen Consort. They had met through The Queen’s Reading Room, Camilla’s charity, set up during the pandemic to encourage children to read: Mantel had even joined her book club, spending a couple of evenings at Clarence House chatting about books (not necessarily her own).
“Saint Augustine says, the dead are invisible, they are not absent. You needn’t believe in ghosts to see that’s true,” Mantel opened the first of her Reith lectures in 2017. All her novels, not just the historical ones, are in some way conversations with the dead. Sometimes the barrier between the living and the dead seems “like an enormous stone wall and sometimes it’s just whisper thin”, she said in one of her last interviews.
“She certainly believed that what we normally see is not all that there is,” Hamilton says. “And she made it pretty clear that she felt that ancestors remained with us in all sorts of meaningful ways.” One of the things he most misses about working with Mantel is receiving an email from her. “Because it was so sharp. It was so funny. She just raised your game.”
While we will sadly never know quite how much fun Mantel might have had with misunderstood Mary and dim Darcy, one thing is sure – it would have been a giant hit. These tiny extracts are tantalising glimpses of what might have been, and a reminder of what we have lost. But Mantel’s spirit is already at work. Work has begun on the TV production of The Mirror and the Light, the final instalment of the Wolf Hall trilogy, starring many of the original cast. Hamilton hopes that her earlier novels, in particular A Place of Greater Safety, may be adapted as well. She will continue to talk to us. A few lines in to the playful first paragraph of Provocation, the narrator pulls us up sharply. “Reader, to think it is to know it.”
Provocation
An extract from Mantel’s unfinished Austen satire
Elizabeth took her new sister’s silence as a token of profundity. But I myself saw that, compared to Georgiana, my sister was Socrates. And this led me to question, in due course, whether Darcy himself were in command of any significant intellectual power. How often, I believe, we women must suppress the question? A solemn countenance, a grave manner, a pre-occupied frown; these suggest to us a mastering of life’s perplexities born of a habit of deep reflection, and vigorous examination of every fact and circumstance. Yet, but what if the frown means nothing but ill humour? If the grave and pre-occupied air means nothing but insufficiency in the face of whatever circumstances present? What if the long silences, so intimidating to my sex, are merely the consequence of having nothing to say? What if that prevailing solemnity results from a simple failure to see the joke? Reader, to think it is to know it: Darcy was a more harmless soul than we had imagined, and replete with good intentions; his silence in company proceeded, not from a conviction of natural superiority, but from a solid, sterling stupidity, such as an English gentleman alone dares display. When was Darcy ever contradicted? His every assertion was treated as scripture. When were his wishes not performed, as if they were law? Such infallible consideration must divide a man from himself: he is dull but never knows it, for he receives witty answers to witless questions. I saw that it would be Elizabeth’s lifetime work to collaborate with his innocent self-conceit. It is what she will give, in return for being mistress of Pemberley.
“Darcy believes it is going to rain!”– and the whole county must seek cover. “Darcy believes there will be a vote in the house!” and all interested parties are agog. Never mind that the sky is clear. Never mind that Parliament is prorogued. We simple souls will all agree that Darcy has power to perceive what is hidden from us, because he is a man, and a gentleman and has a park that is ten miles round.
A death in the morning
Mantel’s first published work, from her school yearbook
The sun rose slowly above the horizon. A brown leaf floated slowly to the ground. A gentle breeze played with the leaves of a tall tree close by. Nothing broke the stillness of the October morning.
The fox was very, very still, his tawny body half covered by the long grass. His eyes were focused on one point – the rabbits’ hole. Soon they would be out. Suddenly he stiffened. He had heard something that was not the wind in the trees, not the rustling of a dead leaf, not a bird flying above him. He crouched there, the rabbits forgotten, his ears straining to hear the slightest sound.
Over the clear morning air came the shattering sound of a loud whinny. The fox needed nothing more. Instantly he was up and fleeing for his life. It was not the first time he had been hunted. He could hear the baying of the hounds now as they caught his scent. He ran on and on. But the hounds were gaining on him. He could hear the thundering hooves of horses and the crack of the huntsman’s whip as he urged the dogs on faster.
Suddenly the fox swerved and jumped a low wall into a field where a flock of sheep were grazing. As he dashed in the midst of them they scattered in all directions, bleating loudly. He ran in and out of the sheep, mixing his scent with theirs. Then he ran on. The pack rushed into the field in full cry, only to stop bewildered when they picked up the many different scents. For a short time they padded round, noses to the ground, but they had lost the scent and the hunt retired to look for a fresh quarry.
After a quarter of a mile further on he stopped, panting and exhausted. He sank into a pile of long grass and crouched there, every muscle tense. He waited. No sound came to his straining ears. So he set off quietly for home. He was one fox who did not intend to be a part of “A death in the morning.”
Hilary Mantel, 1L
• Provocation and A death in the morning © Tertius Enterprises
