In 1998 Hilary Mantel published a novel about The Giant O’Brien, an Irish man over eight foot tall, whose body is displayed, against his last wishes, in a London museum. In the course of writing it, she felt a strange nostalgia. “I felt a great sadness about the loss, for me, of the Irish language. I was aware my mouth was empty.”
The people of west Cork have lost of a new neighbour and a new friend, with the sudden passing of Hilary Mantel, who intended to move there in order to reclaim her European citizenship post-Brexit. Mantel’s Irish heritage was more and less important to her, over the years, but it was key to her relationship with the past. “As a small child, I grew up in what was essentially an Irish family, surrounded by Irish people who were old. By the time I was 10 almost all of them were dead. My consciousness of being Irish seemed to die with them.”
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This family lived in Hadfield, a stony, windswept village in the north of England, in an odd pocket of Irish immigrants who had travelled there to work in the textile industry. Her mother and grandmother (who was illiterate) were both mill-girls. Despite a general sense of social isolation and decline, as a small girl Mantel felt an “effortless superiority” to all Protestants, in a town that still saw sectarian brawling in the streets.
The Britain she grew up in was “scared and insular” and Mantel never felt herself to be part of its establishment. Her social markers of “descent, religion, region, accent” were quickly decoded by those “who possess Englishness” she wrote, and used to exclude. “You are forced off centre. You are a provincial. You are a spectator.”
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This sense of displacement was made fully uncanny by the fact that Mantel did not feel fully at home in the physical world or, indeed, in her own body. Her childhood was haunted by the figures of the dead, not just of her Irish forebears but also those her grandfather left behind when he returned from the first World War. Her grandmother saw her own dead husband in the street and Mantel felt presences from an early age.
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When she was seven, her mother pinned up a picture of Elvis in the kitchen and “took up with a man called Jack”. Mantel experienced a nauseating “disturbance of the air” in the back garden that filled her with dread. She became poorly, a child so subject to illness, the local doctor called “little miss Neverwell.”
These difficulties, which might have reduced her, turned Mantel into one of the leading novelists of the age. She wrote about the difficulties of her own body with a piercing intelligence that could not be denied - her work would help to bring endometriosis, from which she suffered terribly, to the attention of the medical establishment.
An outsider reared in poverty, she would own, in prose, the central myth of Tudor England. “By writing a novel one performs a revolutionary act.” Dame Hilary Mantel was wary of nationalism in all its forms. “”Britain” can be used as a geographical term, but it has no definable cultural meaning” she wrote. “As for calling me “an English writer” - it is simply what I am not.”
