Reading Hilary Mantel: Haunted Decades

241 Pages·2019·2.506 MB·English

by  Lucy Arnold

Reading Hilary Mantel
ii
Reading Hilary Mantel
Haunted Decades
Lucy Arnold
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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First published in Great Britain 2020
Copyright © Lucy Arnold, 2020
Lucy Arnold has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as Author of this work.
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One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing
Material Place –
Emily Dickinson
For my parents, who told me stories.
For E.T., who listened to mine.
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 Not Giving up the Ghost: Preserving the spectral in Mantel’s memoir 13
2 Spectres of Margaret: Thatcherism, care-giving and the gothic in
Every Day is Mother’s Day and Vacant Possession 43
3 Spooks and holy ghosts: Spectral politics and the politics of
spectrality in Eight Months on Ghazzah Street 83
4 The princess and the palimpsest: Skin, screen and spectre
in Beyond Black 109
5 ‘If the dead need translators’: Heresy, haunting and intertextuality
in Wolf Hall 145
Afterword 179
Notes 185
Bibliography 217
Index 228
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the generosity of Hilary Mantel,
whose support of the project and key contributions have been invaluable. I
would like to thank Nick Ray, a colleague and friend who has seen this project
through from its earliest conception to the present day and whose careful and
perceptive reading made me a better writer, and whose kindness and intellectual
support made me a better thinker. Thank you to my colleagues at the University
of Worcester and former colleagues at the University of Leeds who created the
special and productive environment in which this project took shape and whose
guidance and support, both professional and personal, helped to make this
book what it is: Jane Rickard, John McLeod, Julia Reid, Bridget Bennett and
Alaric Hall. I would like to thank my students for their energetic engagement
with what I brought to the table, energy which drove and shaped this project in
innumerable ways.
I am extremely grateful to David Avital at Bloomsbury Academic for
contracting the book early on in the process and for his support and enthusiasm
for the project. I would also like to thank my assistant editor, Lucy Brown, and
her predecessor, Clara Herberg for the patience and kindness with which they
have guided me through this process.
I am indebted to the Huntington Library for the generous research fellowship
that facilitated the archival research which has shaped this project. I was
fortunate to have the opportunity to present material relating to the subject
matter of this book which was invaluable in helping me to shape my ideas.
For this, I would like to thank Nina Roland and the Skepsi team (University
of Kent), Daný van Dam (University of Amsterdam), and Eileen Pollard and
Ginette Carpenter (Manchester Metropolitan University). Earlier versions of
this research were published as ‘Spooks and holy ghosts: Spectral Politics and
the Politics of Spectrality in Hilary Mantel’s ‘Eight Months on Ghazzah Street’,
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 57, no. 3 (2016), 294–309 and ‘Holy
Ghost Writers: Spectrality, Intertextuality and Religion in Wolf Hall and Fludd’
in Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. by Eileen Pollard and
Ginette Carpenter (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 117–32. My thanks to the
editors involved for permission to use that work here. My thanks also to Harvard
Acknowledgements ix
University Press and to the Margaret Thatcher Estate for their kind permission
to reproduce their material here.
Finally my thanks to my family who have been haunted by this book
throughout the long process of its production. Thank you to my sister Alice, and
my brother Joe, whose irreverent cheerleading throughout this book’s evolution
has been unwavering. Thank you to my parents, Karen and Andrew, who taught
me the power of stories in the first place and whose tireless belief in my work has
been a source of immense strength. And thank you to my partner Edd, without
whose love, patience and ferocious belief in me this book wouldn’t exist at all.
This book is for them.
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