Mantel was born Hilary Mary Thompson on July 6, 1952, to Henry and Margaret Thompson in Glossop, a village in Derbyshire, and she grew up in a busy Irish Catholic family. Her mother, Margaret, was a school secretary, Mantel wrote in Giving Up the Ghost, her 2003 memoir. After her mother left her husband and moved the family in with Jack Mantel, an engineer, Mantel took her stepfather’s surname.
It was a tough childhood. “I was unsuited to being a child,” she wrote in her memoir. Mantel suffered health problems, leading a doctor to call her “Little Miss Neverwell”, becoming the first of many doctors to fail to properly treat Mantel, who lived with chronic pain for much of her life.
Struggles with endometriosis
At 18, she moved to London to study law at the London School of Economics but could not afford to finish her training. After marrying Gerald McEwen, a geologist, she became a teacher and started writing on the side.
In her 20s, she realised she was suffering from endometriosis, a condition in which tissue similar to that lining the womb grows elsewhere. Around that time, a doctor ordered her to stop writing. Her response, described in her memoir, was typically forthright: “I said to myself, ‘If I think of another story, I will write it’.”
At 27, having had the endometriosis diagnosis confirmed, she had surgery to remove her uterus and ovaries, although that did not stop the pain. The complications from her illness made a normal day job impossible, she said.
“It narrowed my options in life,” she said, “and it narrowed them to writing”.
The couple went to live in Botswana and Saudi Arabia, an experience Mantel later drew on in her novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, about a British woman living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
She finished her first novel, A Place of Greater Safety, set in the French Revolution, in 1979. It was initially rejected by publishers – she was unknown, and the book, a historical novel, was over 700 pages long. But her second book, a contemporary novel published in 1985, became a critical success, and over the next decades, she developed a cult following.
Yet Mantel did not achieve mainstream success until 2009, with Wolf Hall, the first in her trilogy of books about Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who ended up becoming one of Henry VIII’s most trusted assistants. That novel began with a shocking scene: a teenage Cromwell lying in a pool of his own vomit, having been beaten by his father. Soon, Cromwell decides to make a different life for himself and embarks on a path towards power.
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