Hilary Mantel & Writing Historical Fiction

Hilary Mantel & Writing Historical Fiction

In this post, we look at Hilary Mantel and how she wrote historical fiction.

Before her death in 2022, Hilary Mantel wrote twelve novels and two short story anthologies and eight articles and essays winning 19 important awards and 11 honours including Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2006 Birthday Honours and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to literature.

Mantel’s most famous books are the trilogy she wrote about Thomas Cromwell. The first book, Wolf Hall, won the Booker Prize. The sequel, Bring Up The Bodies, also won the Booker Prize, making her the third person to win the Booker Prize twice, and the only woman. What made this second Booker Prize even more amazing was the fact that it was the only time an author had won it with a sequel. It was this win that shot Mantel into the literary stratosphere. The final book in the series is The Mirror And The Light.

So, what was her secret? Well, she wasn’t a historian. A lot of writers believe you need to be a historian to create books as good as Mantel’s. She is proof that you don’t. But she knew writing Wolf Hall would take time and would be a challenge.

One of the reasons Wolf Hall took so long to write – 20 years – was that she knew ‘she had to do something very difficult: she had to interest the historians, she had to amuse the jaded palette of the critical establishment and most of all she had to capture the imagination of the general reader’.
26 Things That Hilary Mantel Brought To Her Historical Fiction

  1. A brilliant mind.
  2. An understanding that you can’t please everyone every time.
  3. She chose stories she felt she could tell better than other people.
  4. She chose stories that gelled with her own interests and allowed her abilities full rein.
  5. She chose stories she felt driven to tell.
  6. She knew the dangers of her own shortcomings, and inbuilt bias.
  7. She created casts of characters that captivated her, real or fictional.
  8. She knew that historical fiction is demanding work, and that being committed was paramount.
  9. A mixture of mischief, scholarship, and literary skill.
  10. A strong and flexible imagination.
  11. The best writing she could do.
  12. She didn’t twist the truth to fit her story. She built her drama around the facts!
  13. She spent a large amount of time doing exceptional quality and scope of research, from many diverse sources, which she took seriously so that her understanding of the era was well developed before she started writing.
  14. The integrity to stay true to the material.
  15. The ability to ‘live with the ambiguous’.
  16. She knew that even with deep research, arriving at the truth of historical events is never a guarantee.
  17. Her research included general accounts of the era and biographies of the era’s major and minor figures.
  18. Mantel culled information on specifics from evidence that was closest to the source.
  19. She would immerse herself in the culture of the era by
      • Listening to their music
      • Reading their literature
      • Looking at the pictures people in the era would have seen
      • Learning about the food, furniture, clothes, and of course politics.
      • Going even deeper to discover the assumptions, prejudices, and value judgements of people in the era.
  20. The language of the era in which her stories were set, but not so much that it overwhelmed the reader.
  21. With all her material gathered, Mantel reread all the documents and quickly wrote the first draft of a scene.
  22. She wrote in what she considered was between ‘a rage and a trance’.
  23. She was not afraid of rewriting, editing, and picking her drafts apart.
  24. She knew that writers must tell the reader what the historical documents mean beyond the obvious, and what the characters think, and feel.
  25. A facility to suspend judgment, and work with world-views that were not 21stcentury western values.
  26. She wrote to leave her readers with questions and a desire to know more. 

Hilary Mantel’s 3 Best Pieces Of Advice For Other Writers

  1. It’s a long game. You may incubate a project for twenty years. Never despair and never throw anything away. Ideas transmute in the darkness of a drawer, and what doesn’t work now may find its application in the far future.
  2. Be flexible, be supple, be ingenious.
  3. Change the viewpoint, and the story is new.

The Last Word

How Hilary Mantel created her historical fiction was best described by Ross King of The Los Angeles Times when he said, ‘She burrows down through the historical record to uncover the tiniest, most telling details, evoking the minutiae of history as vividly as its grand sweep. The dialogue is so convincing that she seems to have been, in another life, a stenographer taking notes in the taverns and palaces of Tudor England.’

If you would like to learn how to write in first, second, third, or fourth person, sign up for a course with Writers Write. It’s the perfect place to learn.

Elaine Dodge

by Elaine Dodge. Author of The Harcourts of Canada series and The Device HunterElaine trained as a graphic designer, then worked in design, advertising, and broadcast television. She now creates content, mostly in written form, including ghost writing business books, for clients across the globe, but would much rather be drafting her books and short stories.

More Posts From Elaine

  1. Why Writing Is Like Swimming In The Sea
  2. The Art Of Introducing A Character
  3. I Know I Should Care, But Do I?
  4. Thanksgiving – The Legend, The Truth, & How To Write About It
  5. Jamie Oliver & How To Write Inclusivity Correctly
  6. A Comparison Of 5 Novel Editing Platforms
  7. How Much Can I Write Between 1 November And 31 December?
  8. A Comparison of 6 Novel Writing Software
  9. Sweating The Small Stuff – Focusing On Details To Make Your Character More Real And Rounded
  10. Books That Predicted The Future
Posted on: 14th January 2025
(443 views)

1 thought on “Hilary Mantel & Writing Historical Fiction”

Comments are closed.