Mantel Pieces: The New Book from The Sunday Times Best Selling Author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy

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Anderson's book begins, as it should, with the prodigal, the violent, the gross. But what do you expect? Madonna's wedding was different from other people's. I rather admire Hilary the most when she is being deliciously mean as well as rigorously intellectual. A skill she applies across a surprising breadth of topics.

Mantel Pieces: The New Book from The Sunday Times Best

In her essay on Britain's Last Witch, she describes the life of Helen Duncan, a psychic imprisoned in Royal Holloway for divulging state secrets from The Other Side.⠀ Overall, what I enjoyed most was her approach to writing about history, summed up for me in these two quotes:Her awareness of her own body makes her acutely aware of others, as when she considers the ill health of Henry VIII. "Historians &, I'm afraid, doctors, underestimate what chronic pain can do to sour the temper & wear away both the personality and the intellect."⠀ In both women, Mantel recognises how much the dead follow the living around & that to be alive is to be haunted. Her memoir, Giving Up The Ghost, explores this in respect to her own life & draws out her other great preoccupation: bodies & how they limit our world. ⠀ Interspersed among the essays themselves are photocopied correspondences between Mantel and her LRB editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers. Many of these are a chore to make out, being both tiny and handwritten, and since they seem to be selected almost at random I'm not really sure what the benefit will be for most readers. Fun if you'd like a glimpse at how the sausage is made, I suppose. I found every review interesting, even if I thought the book itself wouldn’t be for me. For example, the first review was of Shere Hite’s 1988 effort 'Women and Love'. I’m familiar with Ms Hite’s work from the days when I worked in a bookstore, in California. Mantel nails Hite succinctly calling her work “an uneasy blend of prurience and pedantry”. Ouch! Or, iconoclastically titling the review of Chris Anderson’s book 'In Bed with Madonna' as 'Plain Girl’s Revenge Made Flesh'.

Mantel Pieces by Hilary Mantel review – witty and ferocious

The Hair Shirt Sisterhood – on women saints and suffering. I was reminded a little of The Nun’s Tale by Candace Robb here, probably because of the description of how some of these women sought out suffering When Hilary Mantel first began to write for the London Review of Books in 1987 she warned the editor that she had “no critical training whatsoever”. “Thank goodness,” you think. What Mantel has instead are much more useful qualities: a researcher’s in-depth grasp of every topic she writes about, fearlessness, originality and robust common sense. Her wide-ranging pieces, spanning three decades, are the best kind of critical writing, rich with recondite knowledge, wearing their learning lightly.I will never read most of the twenty books that make up the substance of Mantel Pieces but that doesn’t matter. Each review is a little jewel in itself - exhaustively researched and written in clean, lucid prose. While this essay was written and published well before Meghan married Harry, Mantel’s comments about how Kate is perceived in some ways predict some of the vitriol directed toward Meghan (the majority of the vitriol can be “explained” by racism). A royal body, a female royal body, is only of interest because it is something that has no personality. Meghan has personality in spades. We know Meghan reads.

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I am a big fan of Mantel's writing, although as a writer I am constantly depressed by her with the ever present thought of "how does she write so brilliantly" coupled with the knowledge I won't write anything as good. I think this book is really for the hard core fans rather than just anyone who likes her Wolf Hall trilogy or other works. It consists on selected writing from the London Review of books which she is a frequent reviewer for - including her essay Royal Bodies which caused quite a stir a few years ago, (although for those of a calmer disposition with relation to anything to do with royalty it is hard to see why). Two, on very personal topics, were my favorites. One covered meeting her stepfather when she was four years old, where to my memory, she totally nailed the viewpoint from that age. Another, the frank depiction of her horrific experience in the hospital after surgery, felt like a public service announcement wrapped in a horror story. “None of us thinks the complication rate applies to us.” The debilitating pain of her endometriosis was initially treated with antipsychotics & then abdominal surgery that left her infertile, treated with steroids that transformed her body. ⠀ My favourite “piece” wasn’t a review at all but an essay called 'Meeting the Devil' written on the harrowing aftermath of her medical procedure. I can’t imagine a more intense, graphic telling. This is part of a series of diary writings that reflect on her experiences in Saudi Arabia and meeting her step-father, as well.The most famous essay in this collection of pieces that Mantel wrote from the London Review of Books is Mantel’s “Royal Bodies”. The response to this essay was in part anger, in particular because of a description of Kate Middleton that describes as a “jointed doll on which certain rags are hung . . . a shop-window mannequin with no personality of her own, entirely define by what she wore” (269) and “Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish” (271) and perhaps most damningly “What does Kate read? It’s a question” (271). In my Catholic childhood, I had a fascination with the stories of women who became Catholic saints, so the essay on "holy anorexia" found its perfect audience. Her piece on the way “royal bodies” are viewed and treated by the public and the media is forceful. Another GR reviewer calls Mantel Pieces an "inessential" Mantel book. I don't know anything about that, I've only read this and the Cromwell novels, but it's definitely one of those collections you shouldn't feel guilty for not reading straight through; if you're like me, you'll probably like it better if you don't. These, in my opinion, were the highlights: