However, the cause turned out to be a gynaecological condition, endometriosis, which prevented her having any children.Īt one stage she was hospitalised in a psychiatric ward and began writing, drawing on her own experiences. She was treated with pills and became mildly addicted. In her late teens Mantel began suffering leg pains and lethargy, which were initially wrongly diagnosed as depression.

They would later marry, divorce, then re-marry and he now looks after her business affairs.

The young Hilary attended a convent school, then studied law at the London School of Economics before switching to Sheffield University to be with a Geology student called Gerald McEwen. When her father eventually left, never to be seen again, they moved to Cheshire, where she took the lodger’s surname. Her conventional Catholic upbringing was turned upside down when she was seven-years-old and her mother began an affair with a lodger, Jack Mantel. The eldest of three sisters, she was born Hilary Thompson, in Glossop, Derbyshire, in 1952. Mantel might have slipped under the radar when she was barely known but she’s discovering that matters are entirely different when you are hot property. Her account was inspired by an actual incident when she once spotted the former Prime Minister and formed her finger and thumb into a gun, pretending to shoot her. There have even been calls for the police to investigate. Her latest work has been described as “dangerous nonsense” and Mantel has fanned the flames by revealing that she detested Thatcher. Now the author is again under fire for a short story, in which she imagines Margaret Thatcher assassinated by an IRA sniper. It seemed that Mantel had the Midas touch but last year came the first whiff of controversy when she was quoted as saying the Duchess of Cambridge was forced to be a “shop window mannequin”, whose only purpose was to breed.

The mirror and the light series