Book Reviews

• Citation: Vol. 49 No. 4
• Publication year: 2024
• Year: 2024

BOOK REVIEWS Vol. 49 No. 4 Pg. 27 Vermont Bar Journal January 2024

The Wolf Hall Trilogy

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Henry Holt & Co., 1st U.S. edition, 2009; Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. Henry Holt &Co., 1^st U.S. edition, 2012; The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel. Henry Holt & Co. 1^st U.S. edition, 2020.

Reviewed by Kim Velk, Esq.

Hilary Mantel (1952-2022) was the author of, among many other things, the bestselling series of novels known as the Wolf Hall trilogy. Wolf Hall (2009) and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012), both won the Booker Prize, the UK's most prestigious literary award. Mantel was nominated for the Booker four times during her life and is one of only three authors to have won it twice. (J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey were the others). The final novel of trilogy, The Mirror and the Light (2020), debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Mantel died, age 70, on Sept. 22, 2022.

If you were Mantel admirer, as I was and remain, the news of her death came as a shock. The excellent Masterpiece PBS/ BBC productions of Wolf Hall and Bring of the Bodies (about which more in a moment) had been adapted for television in a single series in 2015. She had delivered the famous BBC Reith Lectures in 2017^[1] (more on that coming too). Just before the pandemic kicked off in 2020, she had been scheduled to give a talk at the 92^nd Street Y in New York City. (I had hoped to attend). It went the way of so many pandemic-era events. She gave the talk remotely, however, in June 2022.^[2] In short, she was popping up regularly on the media horizon as recently as a few months before her death. And while I was aware that her health had been chronically bad - she suffered famously and for years with endometriosis - I thought that was more miserable than perilous.

When I started my job here at the VBA as director of education and communication in March 2021, I nurtured a (wild) hope that I might be able to persuade her to come and speak at one of our meetings. I went so far as emailing her agent. I didn't get a response, which didn't surprise me.

Of course, we will never get the chance to host her in Vermont now. But I'm still here and when I heard the news in December that PBS and the BBC are teaming up again to dramatize the final book in the series, The Mirror and the Light,^[3] it seemed the right moment for me to wave the Mantel banner here. She was a towering literary figure in Britain, but I have long...