Mantel who died in September at the age of 70 is one of my very favorite British novelists.  Her Wolf Hall Trilogy which won two Booker Prizes was a highlight of my reading experience, and I read this collection of book reviews/essays from the London Review of Books as an homage to Mantel.  The afterword refers to the LRB as “Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas” and Mantel was a regular contributor with essays in this collection from 1987 to 2019.  The reviews are accompanied by several illustrations of covers and by email exchanges between Mantel and her editor at the LRB.

The reviews are about as wide-ranging as one could imagine from the British playwright John Osborne’s 20th C work  to Christopher Marlowe’s 16th C plays, from the tale of a colonial woman kidnapped by Indians to the story of Gemma Galgani who became a Catholic saint after dying in 1903.  The largest number of reviews, not surprisingly deal with books about the Tudors, Mantel’s special love.  Cromwell, Henry VIII, Charles Brandon the Duke of Suffolk, Anne Boleyn and several other queens, and Margaret Pole are among those from her trilogy that make an appearance.  Reading those erudite, clever, often very funny essays took me back to Wolf Hall and its extraordinary cast of characters.

The most striking essay, however, dealt with a difficult period in Mantel’s life when she underwent surgery, nearly died, and had a long and challenging recovery.  She is vague on the diagnosis and when it happened, but it was probably endometriosis in her late 20’s.  The chapter on her illness reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill”, Meghan O’Rourke’s book, “The Invisible Kingdom”, and Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor”.  These works delving into the experience of illness compare favorably to the works written by men on the same topic, e.g. Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality and Oliver Sacks’ My Own Life.”   Perhaps women have a deeper sense of their bodies and how these organic structures can fail us.

Read Mantel, her trilogy, her other half a dozen novels, her short stories, and her essays.  She’s brilliant and her sudden death after a stroke is a huge loss for all of us who love great writing and wonderful reading.