![]() ![]() This effect is particularly noticeable in The Mirror and the Light, the long-awaited third instalment of her trilogy about the blacksmith’s son from Putney who became Henry VIII’s right-hand man and the architect of much Tudor policy that reverberates down to the present. ![]() “St Augustine says the dead are invisible, they are not absent.” Mantel opened her first lecture with this quotation, and her historical novels are such towering achievements partly because she appears to inhabit the thoughts and sensory experience of her characters so fully – not so much as if she is channelling Thomas Cromwell, but as if she, disembodied, has projected herself back into his mind and drawn the reader with her as if we are, in effect, ghosts at his shoulder, seeing through his eyes. Ghosts have peopled her fiction from her first novel, Every Day Is Mother’s Day, and her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, made clear how permeable the boundary between the living and the dead can seem. She replied emphatically: “Yes,” almost before he had finished the question. ![]() W hen Hilary Mantel gave her BBC Reith lectures in 2017 on the subject of historical fiction, she was asked by one audience member if she was really writing ghost stories. ![]()
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