Between her dazzling scholarship and frequent hilarity of her dialogue lay her true subject: “the operation”, as she once phrased it, “of memory”. Though best known as a historical novelist, Mantel was less concerned with history than with its shape-shifting relative, recollection. Alison Hart, the troubled jobbing medium in Mantel’s novel Beyond Black, is, if not an alter ego, at least a metaphor for her art. She was brought up as a Catholic, and the idea of transubstantiation – the possibility of one thing changing into another – underlaid her work as a novelist, as did the fact that she “dwelled extensively with the dead”. “History is always changing behind us,” she said. It was central, too, to her relationship with the past. She was describing her re-marriage to her ex-husband Gerald McEwen, but the notion was no less key to her understanding of Thomas Cromwell, who evolved over the 2,000 pages of her Wolf Hall trilogy. “There’s no mileage, really, in believing the opposite,” she wrote in her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Mantel had a great belief in people’s capacity for change.
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