Hilary Mantel transformed our understanding of historical fiction

Hilary Mantel will be chiefly remembered for her trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, the highly influential English statesman during the reign of King Henry VIII. Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) won the Booker Prize, making her the first woman to win the prize more than once, and The Mirror and the Light (2020) was longlisted.

But the popularity of Hilary’s trilogy should not overshadow the remarkable range of her achievement.

A short spell of employment as a social worker lay behind her first published novel, the darkly comic Every Day is Mother’s Day (1985), and its sequel Vacant Possession (1986).

A major historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety (1992) is a characteristically innovative interpretation of the French Revolution. Here, as throughout Hilary’s writing, a far-sighted grasp of the sweep of history and politics was fused with the inward particularities of individual experience.

She spent extended periods of her life overseas — notably in Botswana and Saudi Arabia — and she was always alert to a world beyond Britain. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988) is a tense account of misunderstandings between westerners and Saudis living in Jeddah. A Change of Climate (1994) draws on her life in Botswana, and the traumatic social divisions she had witnessed in southern Africa.

She had an unusually wide and well-informed grasp of social and cultural politics, but she never lost her interest in lives that unfold on the edge of what might be perceived as normality.

The Giant, O’Brien (1998), based on Charles Byrne, a 7 ft 7 inch tall Irish man who suffered from gigantism, and the Scottish surgeon John Hunter, is in part a rueful reflection on her own Irish roots.

The legacies of Irish catholicism also shadow An Experiment in Love (1995), a novel that looks back on the lives of girls of Hilary’s postwar generation — eager to take advantage of new opportunities for education, but still haunted by the constraints of the past.

The sense that another world exists, its presence flickering just past our everyday vision, underlies all of her work. Beyond Black (2005) is an unsettling but entertaining account of the life of a ‘medium’.

Giving up the Ghost (2003), a searing memoir, repeatedly returns to the ghosts that stalked her early years — family ghosts, ghosts of unborn children, ghosts of lives that might have taken a different shape. Learning to Talk (2003), published in the same year, is a collection of short stories that turn on the same theme.

These stories are in part autobiographical recollections of her childhood, as she began to remove herself from the divided world of her family. Here too, sharply observed details linger.

More recent short stories have been openly political, and sometimes controversial — notably The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (2014).

This shining stream of writing has now come to an end.