It was only after she died that he opened the last one. Mantel would leave notebooks and diaries all over the flat in Budleigh Salterton, Devon, where the couple lived for 12 years, but they had an honourable agreement that McEwen would never read them. (Mantel was close friends with the Huntington’s now retired curator of British historical manuscripts Mary Robertson, with whom she was in constant contact.) No one will be able to read the notebooks – divided into manuscript notes and personal diaries – until after McEwen’s death. The rest, along with around 150 A5 notebooks, have been sent to the Huntington Library in California, where her archive is kept.
Mantel had written 20,000 words of Provocation, but the two brief paragraphs published here, read at her memorial in Southwark Cathedral this week, are the only ones Gerald McEwen, Mantel’s husband, felt were finished enough to share with the world. “She felt that it was time to get away from the really serious research and the big historical novels, to do something lighter.” “I think she thought, ‘I can just have a whole load of fun,’” says her long-term agent, Bill Hamilton. From 2,000 pages of bloody Tudor pageantry to Austen’s two-inches of ivory, it is a dizzying shift in scale.
Even more intriguingly, it was planned as a mischievous Austen mashup, with characters from all her novels making an appearance in unfamiliar guises. We now know the answer to Atwood’s question: Mantel was working on a rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, told from the perspective of the overlooked middle sister Mary Bennet, to be titled Provocation. Aside from her Cromwell novels, Mantel had a habit of confounding expectations, with each new work so different from its predecessor. “I don’t know, but I will miss it.” In this, she spoke for readers around the world, eagerly awaiting a new book from the author of the Wolf Hall trilogy. “W hat might she have written next?” asked Margaret Atwood in her tribute to Hilary Mantel, after the Booker prize-winning novelist’s sudden death in September last year.
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