A collection of journalistic writing by Hilary Mantel is to be published next month, just over a year after the Wolf Hall author’s death.
The new book, A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing, will feature four decades of Mantel’s work across a broad range of subjects, from her health struggles as a young woman and her time living in Saudi Arabia to the themes that fed into novels, including revolutionary France and Tudor England.
The collection, which publisher John Murray calls the “final book” from Mantel, will be published on 19 October. The publication will see the author’s 2017 Reith Lectures – which explored the process of art bringing history and the dead back to life – published in one place for the first time.
“This provocative, intimate and often hilarious collection of Hilary’s best pieces shows one of our great essayists writing with startling precision across a huge spectrum of topics, from the deeply personal to the sublime and the absurd,” said Mantel’s agent Bill Hamilton. “It is full of memorable delights and gives us a grandstand view of the life and career of an outstanding writer.”
Mantel wrote 17 books and is best-known for her Thomas Cromwell trilogy – Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light – the first two of which won the Booker prize. The series has sold more than 5m copies worldwide and has been translated into 41 languages. The celebrated author’s other works include A Place of Greater Safety, Giving Up the Ghost and The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. She also wrote for various publications, including the Guardian, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. Mantel died suddenly, aged 70, on 22 September 2022 after a stroke.
The new collection is “constantly entertaining and illuminating”, said Nicholas Pearson, publisher at John Murray, adding that with the book a “complete pattern of her life and its many interests emerges in prose that is endlessly dazzling”.
Mantel was a film critic at the Spectator from 1987 to 1991, and the new book features a selection of these reviews, from When Harry Met Sally to Robocop. Other subjects of the collection’s pieces include Mantel’s father, nationalism and Mantel’s sense of belonging, the legacy of Princess Diana and Jane Austen.
The pieces “play some of the chords beneath her work as a novelist”, said Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation. “All of Mantel’s wit, her drive, her eloquence and irony are here, to keep the reader company once more.”
Mantel had been working on a “mashup” of Jane Austen novels when she died, it was revealed at her memorial service last year. An extract from it was published in the Guardian, along with her earliest published work.
