Hilary Mantel, the celebrated author of the Wolf Hall trilogy, was working on a “mashup” of Jane Austen novels when she died suddenly, her literary agent told a packed memorial service at Southwark cathedral on Thursday.
“She was having the greatest fun dissecting a literary icon,” said Bill Hamilton before a “fragment” of the unfinished novel, Provocation, was read by the actor Aurora Dawson-Hunte.
Mantel was working on the book when she had a stroke at her home in Devon last September. The double Booker prize winner was also preparing to move to Ireland. Her death at the age of 70 stunned the literary world and her legions of fans.
Thursday’s celebration of her life included tributes, readings, music, and film and photographs of the author. Mark Rylance, who played Thomas Cromwell in the television adaptation of the trilogy, read an extract from Wolf Hall, and Ben Miles, who played the character in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage adaptation, spoke movingly of Mantel’s “immeasurable gifts”.
The Very Revd Andrew Nunn, the dean of Southwark cathedral, said it was a “very appropriate place” to host the celebration of Mantel’s life and work as it had been “caught up” in the “bloody business of the Reformation”.
Mantel was a “person of brilliance, insight and extraordinary talent,” he said, and it was his “joy and privilege” to welcome the author’s family, friends and devoted readers to the occasion.
In a tribute read on his behalf, Mantel’s brother Brian told how his sister had used her skills as a “natural storyteller” to entertain him with historical tales when he was unwell as a child. Words were to Mantel as the piano was to Mozart or a paintbox to Picasso, he said. As the last surviving member of their nuclear family of five, “I now have memories no one else shares,” he said.
Anne Preston, a friend of Mantel’s for almost 60 years, described how the author introduced her to the works of Shakespeare at the age of 12. She was unusual, interesting, intelligent and funny, and “she opened doors to new worlds to me”. As a writer, she was “a consummate craftsman and a weaver of spells”.
The actor Lydia Leonard read an extract from an article on the royal family, in which Mantel described a reception at Buckingham Palace where guests parted at the Queen’s arrival and studied a Vermeer rather than meet the monarch’s eye.
“The self-possessed became gauche and the eloquent were struck dumb,” Mantel wrote. “And then the queen passed close to me and I stared at her. I am ashamed now to say it, but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.”
Hamilton spoke of her “glittering intelligence” and “astonishing virtuosity”. The Wolf Hall trilogy contained “passages of such glitter and profundity that they give you the shivers”. Yet every day and every week, “she tried to write better”.
Contributors to the occasion spoke of her humour and kindness. “She was a mentor to many” and was “hugely supportive of fellow writers”, said Charlie Redmayne, chief executive of HarperCollins, Mantel’s publisher. Miles said she began every email and conversation over a decade of friendship with “Are you OK?”
“Those three small words are a testament of an unending kindness. It was never a general inquiry, but a precise question. There was an intensity, a specificity to her concern for your wellbeing,” he said. “I saw actors reduced to tears of joy as a consequence of Hilary’s perfectly timed and exquisitely phrased offers of praise.”
Mantel’s widower, Gerald McEwen, a geologist she married in 1973 and again in 1982 after a one-year divorce, and her family asked those attending the memorial service to make donations to Scene and Heard, a charity that uses theatre to benefit children. Mantel was its patron.
The Guardian will publish an exclusive extract from Mantel’s unfinished novel in the Saturday Magazine.
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