Hilary Mantel

Photograph by Andrea Artz 

Hilary Mantel’s Life with Ghosts

The author, who has died at the age of seventy, saw little distinction between the living and the dead.

By Larissa MacFarquhar

September 24, 2022

One of the finest writers in English ever to live, Hilary Mantel, has died. If Britain were as grateful for her as it ought to be, there would be another funeral next week, as magnificent as the one for the Queen this week, though it would be attended by different people because Mantel could be rude about royalty. There are not many writers who, like prophets, seize, melt down, and reshape the archetypal stories of their people.