Author of historical novels, famous for her trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, the writer died on September 22.
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A few days before the French exit, at Sonatine, from the mirror and the light (1008 pages, 25 euros), last part of his romantic biography of the Minister of King Henri VIII, Thomas Cromwell, the counselor, whose two parts Previous earned him each a Booker Prize, Hilary Mantel died in Exeter (United Kingdom), September 22, at the age of 70 years.
Romancière who has experienced a tremendous popularity for her historical novels, whose most famous series is translated in more than forty languages, Hilary Mantel, née Thompson, was not intended for writing.
Born in a family of Irish origin on July 6, 1952, in Glossop, near Manchester, she confessed in her memoirs, Giving Up the Ghost (2003, not translated), suffering from a triple handicap: be “woman, north and poor”. She grew up in a village in the Derbyshire, of which she escapes by an already overflowing imagination. The family is dysfunctional, the secrets of many and the ordinary shame. Office employee, the father, who cohabits four years with his wife’s lover, leaves the house when she is 11 years old. The little girl, who follows the teaching of rigorous Catholic nuns, loses faith but wins the patronym of her stepfather, even if her mother does not marry Jack Mantel.
a girl of paper
This is the time when her body “falls into pieces” and, if she takes refuge in reading, the historical stories in particular, the endometriosis which makes her suffer terribly – especially as the pain is secret in A time when we don’t talk about the body – is not diagnosed. At his 19th birthday, evil gets worse. She will have to wait until another eight years – a period that she occupies to follow her husband, Gerald McEwen, a geologist who swaps the study of the limestone of Sheffield for the soils rich in diamonds of the Bostwana – before a decisive operation Relieves when he returns to England. But the loss of his uterus and his ovaries condemns Hilary Mantel to have no other children than her books to come.
She who wanted to be a lawyer and studied the right to the London School of Economics very early on the misogyny of an environment which disqualifies it, especially as its state of health disabling it catalog as “hysterical and neurotic” . Postoperative hormonal treatments like other surgical interventions undergoes traumatize Hilary Mantel, which escapes more than ever in fiction. But if she thus invents a paper girl, Catriona, it is only one of the specters – undoubtedly the most intimate and the most heartbreaking – that mark out her romantic work.
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