First scholarly appraisal of Hilary Mantel co-edited by English lecturer

Dr Ginette Carpenter and Dr Eileen Pollard with their new book

The first scholarly volume on the work of Hilary Mantel has been co-edited by an English lecturer.

Mantel is one of the most popular and lauded novelists working today and the first British writer to win the Booker Prize on two separate occasions – for 2009's Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies in 2012.

Co-edited by Dr Ginette Carpenter, Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University and Dr Eileen Pollard, a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chester, Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (published 6th September) is the first collection of essays on this highly celebrated British author – making it the first book-length academic response to her work to date.

Published by Bloomsbury, the book is a critical guide to Mantel's work, from her earliest novels through to her recent Thomas Cromwell fictions, including analysis of her short story collections and memoir.

Chapters cover such topics as Mantel's engagement with history to her deployment of the spectral and her extensive intertextuality - the relationship between texts, especially literary ones. It also includes a comprehensive interview with Mantel herself that explores her work and career.

The foreword is written by journalist, broadcaster and author, Mark Lawson, who describes Mantel as "among the most consistently inventive and interesting writers in contemporary literature". 

Dr Ginette Carpenter was awarded her PhD on the reading subject in contemporary women’s writing in 2010 and has published work on Jeanette Winterson, Elizabeth Jane Howard and women and the gothic.

The main objective of this book is to provide a wide range of readers with a guide to Mantel’s historical fiction, autobiographical writing and short stories, as well as some of her more experimental early novels, that will help explain those most ambiguous elements of her body of work, while demonstrating her fearlessness and breadth as a writer.

Dr Pollard was awarded her PhD on the writing of Hilary Mantel in 2013. She has worked in the Department of English at the University of Chester since 2015. She is also co-editor (with Berthold Schoene) of Accelerated Times: British Literature in Transition, 1980-2000 (forthcoming Cambridge University Press).

Dr Carpenter said: “The main objective of this book is to provide a wide range of readers with a guide to Mantel’s historical fiction, autobiographical writing and short stories, as well as some of her more experimental early novels, that will help explain those most ambiguous elements of her body of work, while demonstrating her fearlessness and breadth as a writer.”

Dr Pollard said: “Despite Mantel’s renown and popularity at home and abroad, there remains surprisingly little critical material interpreting the rich and varied content of her work. As a result, this collection of essays aims to introduce students, scholars and general readers of Mantel’s writing to the diversity of her texts in order to showcase the extraordinary range and reach of this contemporary British author, currently at the peak of her writing life.”

“Our thanks go to Hilary Mantel for her incredibly kind and generous support of this volume from its inception and throughout as well as heartfelt and sincere thanks for the gift of her work; its fierce intelligence, beauty and depth are what makes a volume like this possible.”