Author, author / Mi first reaction was shock, says Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel

Author, author

When a journalist contacted me recently to talk about the 30th anniversary of Virago Modern Classics, my first reaction was shock, says Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel
Sat 24 May 2008 00.13 BST

W

hen a journalist contacted me recently to talk about the 30th anniversary of Virago Modern Classics, my first reaction was shock. Thirty years? Where had the time gone? When those lovely, green-spined books began to appear, I wasn't aware of them because I was living in Botswana, a country which, though peaceful and democratic, does not, when I look back, seem to me to bear much resemblance to the country depicted in the novels of Alexander McCall Smith. Botswana, which is a huge country, had then one tarred road of about 70km; elsewhere there were tracks, of various degrees of bumpiness, and what were called cut lines - that's to say, there was only a road for a truck if you got out and hacked one.

There were telephones, which worked sometimes; no TV, even over the border in South Africa; a government news-sheet, called in a no-nonsense way the Daily News, which had no news in it. I subscribed to the TLS, which came late after many overland adventures, and in those days was hardly a publication to get you excited. For what seemed like months, the letters columns were dominated by a fraught, increasingly savage set of exchanges about Gray's "Elegy". The controversy centred on the line "And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds", which - some lamented - Gray wouldn't have written if he had been less ignorant about sheep farming.

Like the TLS, I was blissfully disconnected from the real world. I was writing a novel; I had no idea that elsewhere the notion of the female tradition in writing was being rethought, revitalised. My book was set during the French revolution, and the first draft had hardly any women in it. Partly this was because I was slow to grasp that the point of fiction was to make things up. Evidence about the women in the lives of my men was so scant that I could do nothing with it, and I felt no pressure to try. But then it struck me that when the men came home from a hard day's rioting, they had no one to come home to. The second draft was a bit better. There were some women, but they were all idiots. I had learned to invent, but inventing the experience of 18th-century women seemed to me much harder than working out what it was that animated men who hoped to change the world.

I finished that novel, or so I thought, at the end of 1979. Then the manuscript had some misadventures, and so did I. It wasn't until 1991 that the dusty pages came down from the shelf for a reassessment, and a very swift revision in the run-up to publication. By then we were living, and I was writing, in a remade world. Ashamed of myself, I wondered what I'd thought I was doing, back in the 70s, tapping away through the hot afternoons. How had I failed to notice that women hold up half the sky? The joke is that, if you had asked me if I was a feminist, I would have said yes.

I would have said I was committed to equal rights, equal pay and equal opportunities. But I obviously wasn't committed to equal representation - not in the literary sense. What did they do, the women in my early drafts? They kept house. When they voiced a political sentiment, it was uninformed and/or reactionary. They cast off their Marie Antoinette frocks and took to dashing English riding habits, wearing their husbands' politics on their backs. When the going got tough, they shrieked a bit. They completely missed the point of revolution. They said things such as "Oh, do be careful, darling: do you really have to go out there?"

Even in the early 90s, much of the material we now have about revolutionary women was not generally available - or rather, it was there, but we weren't seeing it. The politicised faction-fighters and the street militants were not much more than names to me. All the same, I found it possible, and indeed necessary, to rethink my women, reimagine them, as the possessors of suppressed histories and mutinous thoughts, so that eventually their words and ideas became a powerful undercurrent in the book; they were no longer reactionaries, but subversives. One of the book's reviewers put the point neatly: I had shown, he said, that "household names come out of households". But another reviewer objected that there was "a great deal about wallpaper". How much? I checked. In one chapter, a new bride, redecorating, asks her husband: "Shall we have treillage?" His response is: "Lucile, ask me a real question." For this reviewer, however, I had put a dent in the seriousness of the topic; I had dragged in the domestic.

Around this time, I reread a historical novel I had hugely admired when it was first published in 1979. It was Thomas Flanagan's The Year of the French, which was about the Irish rebellions of 1798. I found that, on re-reading, I liked the book much less. Where were the women? What was their role? They were there to provide romantic interest. They were there to be sweet victims. They were there to deepen the sense of tragedy, but they were no more animated than a pile of damp handkerchiefs.

I have never gone back to the book, despite a deep interest in its subject matter. On second reading, it seemed false. A revolution in consciousness had taken place, and I had been very late at the barricades, so I could hardly blame the men for not showing up till later, if at all. Even now you will hear, from female critics as well as male, a regular complaint, a bleat - and I call it a bleat as one who, like Gray, knows nothing of sheep farming - that even today women writers play safe with small, domestic novels. They have forgotten that grand truth we learned, or relearned, at the close of the 20th century: the personal is political. The domestic novel need not be small, or tame. Homes are very unsafe places to linger. The crime statistics will tell you the streets are safer. Everything, even warfare, happens first in the kitchen, in the nursery, in the cradle, and no one grows up without a coup d'état against the powers that be; revolution is a daily task, a common story, the narrative that drives all others.

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