PRIZE-WINNING NOVELIST’S HISTORICAL FICTION REACHED MILLIONS OF READERS

Writer of 17 books twice won Britain’s Booker Prize for her works on the life of Thomas Cromwell, which were adapted for both stage and screen, and was awarded the title of Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, in 2015

Hilary Mantel, one of Britain’s most decorated novelists, whose trilogy of books on the life of Thomas Cromwell – Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light – received both critical acclaim and commercial success, landing on bestseller lists around the world, died Thursday at a hospital in Exeter, England. She was 70.

Her death, after she had suffered a stroke Monday and endured chronic pain for much of her life, was confirmed by Bill Hamilton, her long-time literary agent.

“She had so many great novels ahead of her,” he said, adding, “It’s just an enormous loss to literature.”

Ms. Mantel, the author of 17 books, twice won Britain’s Booker Prize, for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies both of which sold millions of copies. She was longlisted for the same prize, for The Mirror and the Light, in 2020. The novels led to popular stage and screen adaptations.

But it was a long and arduous road to reach those heights, beginning with a tough childhood. “I was unsuited to being a child,” Ms. Mantel wrote in a 2003 memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. She endured numerous health problems, leading one doctor to call her “Little Miss Neverwell.” The doctor was the first of many to fail to properly treat her.

Her illnesses later proved so debilitating that she could not hold down regular jobs, steering her to writing. But even then it was a writer’s life of fits and starts. Mainstream success did not come to her until she was well into her 50s.

Her Cromwell books were the turning point. Enraptured critics said she had presented the historical novel as high literature, portraying her subjects not as cardboard characters from centuries past but as real people of contradictions and psychological complexity, relatable in any age. And readers were carried along by her storytelling power.

Critic Parul Sehgal wrote in a 2020 review of The Mirror and the Light in The New York Times that Ms. Mantel’s writing envelops the reader “in the sweep of a story rich with conquest, conspiracy and mazy human psychology.” Ms. Mantel was not just a writer of historical fiction, Ms. Sehgal said, but an expert in showing “what power reveals and conceals in human character.”

Hilary Mantel was born Hilary Mary Thompson on July 6, 1952, to Henry and Margaret Thompson in Glossop, a village in Derbyshire, and grew up in an Irish Catholic family. Her mother was a school secretary. After her mother left her husband and moved the family in with Jack Mantel, an engineer, Hilary took her stepfather’s surname.

At 18, she moved to London to study law at the London School of Economics, but she could not afford to finish her training. After marrying Gerald Mcewen, a geologist, she became a teacher and started writing on the side.

In her 20s, Ms. Mantel was diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition in which tissue similar to that lining the womb grows elsewhere. Around that time, a doctor ordered her to stop writing. Her response, described in her memoir, was typically forthright: “I said to myself, ‘If I think of another story, I will write it.’ ”

At 27, having had the endometriosis diagnosis confirmed, she had surgery to remove her uterus and ovaries, although that did not stop the pain. The complications from her illness made a normal day job impossible, she said.

“It narrowed my options in life,” she said, “and it narrowed them to writing.”

The couple went to live in Botswana and Saudi Arabia, an experience that Ms. Mantel later drew on in her novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, about a British woman living in Jeddah.

She finished her first novel, A Place of Greater Safety, set in the French Revolution, in 1979. It was initially rejected by publishers – she was unknown, and the book, a historical novel, was over 700 pages long. But her second book, a contemporary novel published in 1985, became a critical success, and over the next decades she developed a following.

Yet Ms. Mantel did not achieve mainstream recognition until 2009, with Wolf Hall, the first in her trilogy about Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who rose to become one of Henry VIII’S most trusted assistants. That novel began with a shocking scene: a teenage Cromwell lying in a pool of his own vomit, having been beaten by his father. Cromwell soon decides to make a different life for himself and embarks on a path toward power.

She did not just reawaken readers to Cromwell’s life in her novels; she also helped bring him to the stage in a series of awardwinning plays and a BBC TV series. She co-wrote the stage adaptation of the final book in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, with Ben Miles, the actor who played Cromwell in the production. (Mark Rylance played him in the BBC series.)

The trilogy was translated into 41 languages and sold more than five million copies worldwide. It also helped rehabilitate Cromwell’s image by presenting him as abrilliantandrevolutionarystrategist.

“Hilary has reset the historical patterns,” Diarmaid Macculloch, an Oxford theology professor and historian and the author of a Cromwell biography, told the Times in 2020.

Even after she rose to prominence, Ms. Mantel never became a fixture in London’s literary scene. She led a quiet life in Budleigh Salterton, a village on the coast of Devon, where she and her husband mostly kept to themselves as she focused on her writing.

She could be sharp-witted and iconoclastic in her views and didn’t fear stirring controversy with her irreverent attitude toward British politics and royalty. She was attacked by the tabloids for remarks she made during a lecture at the British Museum in 2013, when she compared Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, with “a shop-window mannequin” with no personality. She drew the ire of conservative British politicians over a short story she wrote that imagined a planned assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

Still, despite her skepticism of pomp and the political establishment, she was a national icon. In 2015, Prince Charles anointed Ms. Mantel with the title of Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, the equivalent of knighthood.

Ms. Mantel leaves her husband, Mr. Mcewen. The couple did not have any children. Her agent, Mr. Hamilton, said she also leaves a younger brother, Brian Mantel, a management consultant.