A Memoir of My Former Self by Hilary Mantel review – smart reflections on Wolf Hall, religion… and RoboCop

This collection of essays and journalism is a poignant reminder of the novelist’s expansive mind, and of what more she might have achieved

There is a line in Hilary Mantel’s 2008 essay The Books I Will Never Write that leaps out with particular poignancy, a year after her death. To tell the stories of all the incidental historical characters whose lives “would weave a beautiful fiction”, she says, “I shall have to live till I’m 90 and never retire”. If only, you think. When Mantel died in September 2022 at the age of 70, she was “a writer at the peak of her powers, one for whom fresh creative vistas were just opening up”, as her longtime editor, Nicholas Pearson, writes in the foreword to A Memoir of My Former Self, a posthumous collection of articles spanning four decades of her nonfiction. The thought of all the books she might have written had she lived another 20 years is almost too painful to contemplate. (Pearson also drops in the teasing detail that she had been working on a new novel, Provocation, about Mary Bennet from Pride and Prejudice; of the many writers who have attempted to extend the life of Austen’s characters, it’s hard to think of anyone else who could have hewed so closely to Austen’s waspish humour and keen eye for human folly, as the essay Not “Everybody’s Dear Jane”, reprinted here, can testify.

But we must be grateful that she has left us this collection of pieces, thoughtfully compiled by Pearson into five thematic sections corresponding to different aspects of Mantel’s writing life, and illustrated with personal photographs. She was a prolific contributor to newspapers and periodicals on a range of subjects, from politics and religion to perfume and cricket, in addition to her numerous essays on the craft of writing fiction and on her own history.