The Very Rev Andrew Nunn, Dean of Southwark Cathedral, welcomed guests to celebrate Hilary Mantel, author of
the celebrated trilogy Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light.
Bill Hamilton, her agent, revealed she’d been working on a new novel, Provocations, ‘a mash-up’ of Pride and Prejudice and other Jane Austen novels, seen from the point of view of Mary Bennet. Actor Aurora Dawson-Hunte, who was in the stage adaptation of The Mirror and the Light, gave a reading from the unfinished novel.
Her editor, Nicholas Pearson, recalled how she began her career by writing for Auberon Waugh at the Literary Review before becoming film critic of the Spectator. She could spend two hours reading a single newspaper, leaving it ‘like a drunk had been at it’. Inspiration for her books came from Shakespeare – and the ‘Flats to let’ section in newspapers’ small ads. Actress Lydia Leonard, who was in Bring Up the Bodies, read from Eyeing Up the Queen (Royal Bodies), Mantel’s piece on seeing the Queen at Buckingham Palace: ‘The Queen passed close to me and I stared at her. I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.
‘Such was the hard power of my stare that Her Majesty turned and looked back at me, as if she had been jabbed in the shoulder; and, for a split second, her face expressed not anger but hurt bewilderment. She looked young: for a moment, she had turned back from a figurehead into the young woman she was, before monarchy froze her and made her into a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.’
Mantel’s childhood friend Anne Preston recalled how they had been entranced by Shakespeare as children, reading the parts from either side of the fire. Mantel, she said, had a ‘muse of fire within her’.
Zadie Smith read from How I Began Writing, Mantel’s Reith Lecture. Actor Mark Rylance read from Wolf Hall.
Mantel’s brother Brian Mantel said, ‘Words to my sister were like a piano to Mozart or a paintbrush to Picasso – or Holbein.’
JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
