Hilary Mantel papers, 1980-2016

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Summary

Creators:
Mantel, Hilary, 1952-2022
Abstract:
The collection is comprised primarily of the manuscripts and correspondence of British novelist Hilary Mantel (1952-2022). Manuscripts include short stories, lectures, interviews, scripts, radio plays, articles and reviews, as well as various drafts and notes for Mantel's novels; also included: diaries, photographs, audio materials and ephemera.
Extent:
116 Linear Feet (132 boxes, 3 oversize folders)
Language:
Materials are in English.
Preferred citation:

[Identification of item]. Hilary Mantel papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Background

Scope and content:

Scope and Content Note -- Part I and Addenda

The collection is comprised primarily of manuscripts and correspondence of British author Hilary Mantel (1952-2022). Manuscripts include short stories, lectures, radio plays, articles and reviews, as well as various drafts and notes for Mantel's novels. Notably, all four drafts of A Place of Greater Safety are present, including Mantel's early drafts written while living in Saudi Arabia. Copious notes for The Giant, O'Brien are present, as well as significant notes for Fludd and A Change of Climate. The 2005 addenda include prolific notes and drafts of Beyond Black.

Personal and business correspondence with a number of other prominent authors and figures is present, including Elizabeth Jane Howard, Barbara Epstein, Norman Hampson, Lesley Glaister, Miranda Miller and Auberon Waugh. Email strings have been catalogued according to the oldest full email present, with added entries made for the authors of email replies and significant addressees, excepting Hilary Mantel.

SEALED: Boxes 47-52 contain Mantel's diaries and are sealed for the lifetime of Mantel's widower, Gerald McEwen.

Mantel's engagement books are monthly planners to cover appointment and events from 1989- 1997.

Ephemera includes printed items by and about Hilary Mantel, research materials, variants of cover art, publisher publicity for Mantel's books, and literature about various festivals and lectures with which Mantel has been involved. Of note are some materials relating to Mantel's life in Saudi Arabia, influential in her novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street : an Arabic calendar, maps of Jeddah and a psychological evaluation of Mantel and her husband, Gerald McEwen.

Audio tapes and CDs include interviews with Hilary Mantel, readings from her novels, and various radio programs Mantel wrote for or was involved with.

Photographs include snapshots and professional portraits of Hilary Mantel and others. Some photographs appear to have been taken for book jackets.

Scope and Content Note -- Part II

The manuscripts in Part II include articles, short stories, interviews, and notes and drafts for various novels, including Giving Up the Ghost and the first two novels in Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy: Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. This material includes numerous drafts of the novels, play scripts and television adaptations based on the novels.

The correspondence includes Business Correspondence and Personal Correspondence; the Business Correspondence contains letters and emails from Mantel's publishers, agents, newspapers and magazines, and a large number of requests for Mantel to speak at various conferences and events. The Personal Correspondence is mainly letters and emails from family, friends and personal fan letters.

There are a number of topics covered extensively in both correspondence series: Endometriosis, Mantel's Booker Prize wins in 2009 and 2012, Mantel's work being plagiarized in 2005 by Judith Kelly in her memoir Rock Me Gently and the controversy caused by Mantel in her "Royal Bodies" comments in 2013.

This material also includes a small number of photographs, mainly snapshots and studio portraits, CDs and ephemera. The ephemera contains material about festivals, lectures, honorary degrees, financial reports and annotated envelopes; also included are a small number of engagement diaries.

Biographical / historical:

British author Hilary Mantel was born in Derbyshire, England on July 6, 1952; she married Gerald McEwen in 1972. Mantel's work includes articles, book reviews, novels, personal memoirs, short stories, and historical fiction. In 2009 Mantel was awarded the Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall and in 2012 she was awarded the Booker Prize a second time for Bring Up the Bodies. Among many other awards and prizes, Mantel was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2006 and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2014. Dame Hilary Mantel died at a hospital in Exeter, England, on September 22, 2022, from complications of a stroke.

Acquisition information:

Part I was purchased from Hilary Mantel, February 2001 (Accession 2083).

Addenda was purchased from Hilary Mantel, 2005 (Accession 2460).

Part II consists of material purchased from Hilary Mantel in 2009 (Accession 2606) and material purchased in 2016 (CSmH_2016_273).

Processing information:

According to the author's notations, the original title for An Experiment in Love was On Thinner Ice. Manuscripts with the original title have been catalogued under the published title, An Experiment in Love.

Among the addenda are several versions of Hilary Mantel's 2005 novel Beyond Black. Various dated drafts of the chapters of this manuscript were received in no particular order, with only two full drafts among the papers. Individual chapters of the novel therefore, have been cataloged separately or in small groups as grouped by the author, and organized by date. The two full drafts have been cataloged as whole items, but are parsed out (a)-(m) by chapter and the collation lines reflect each individual chapter. The whole drafts are cataloged chronologically with all other drafts.

Furthermore, the numbering of the chapters and the prologue were changed by the author partway through the writing process. The existing number was used in cataloging each chapter regardless of the chapter number in the published form. In particular therefore, early versions of a chapter may be numbered one integer lower than the published chapter, and parties interested in all versions of a particular chapter should be aware of this when requesting the manuscripts.

The Hilary Mantel Papers were cataloged over a span of 12 years and multiple acquisitions, resulting in a collection organized by accretion, with each new acquisition added on in sequence at the end of the collection, rather than interspersed with similar or related materials. Therefore, each separate acquisition must be searched to locate all of the relevant manuscripts or correspondence by a particular author.

Because the collection was cataloged over a span of 12 years, the names and dates of various people in the collection have changed, usually in order to conform to changing standards in national cataloging practices; in other instances, an individual remarried or died. It was not practical for us to retroactively update the previously cataloged names on the folders or in the Finding Aid, so researchers will find different forms of names used for the same individuals in discrete sections of the collection.

Arrangement:

Organized in the following series:

  1. Manuscripts (Boxes 1-28)
  2. Correspondence (Boxes 29-46)
  3. Diaries (Boxes 47-52)
  4. Engagement Books (Box 53)
  5. Ephemera (Boxes 54-55)
  6. Audio Tapes and CDs (Box 56)
  7. Oversize (Box 57)
  8. Photographs (Box 58)
  9. Extra Oversize (Boxes 59-60)
  10. Extra Oversize Loose Folders (3)
  11. Addenda - Manuscripts (Boxes 61-78)
  12. Addenda - Correspondence (Boxes 79-80)
  13. Addenda - Ephemera (Box 81)
  14. Part II - Manuscripts (Boxes 82-103)
  15. Part II - Business Correspondence (Boxes 104-115)
  16. Part II - Personal Correspondence (Boxes 116-125)
  17. Part II - Photographs, Audio Visual and Ephemera (Boxes 126-132)
Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Indexed terms

Subjects:
Apartheid -- South Africa
Endometriosis
Man Booker Prize
Plagiarism -- Great Britain -- History -- 21st century
V.S. Pritchett Prize
Women novelists, English -- 20th century -- Archives
Women novelists, English -- 21st century -- Archives
World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives
Adaptations (literary works) -- Great Britain -- 20th century
Adaptations (literary works) -- Great Britain -- 21st century
Clippings (Books, newspapers, etc.)
Ephemera -- Great Britain -- 20th century
Ephemera -- Great Britain -- 21st century
Family papers.
Interviews -- Great Britain -- 20th century
Interviews -- Great Britain -- 21st century
Letters (correspondence) -- Great Britain -- 20th century
Manuscripts -- Great Britain -- 20th century
Manuscripts -- Great Britain -- 21st century
Photographs.
Scripts (documents) -- Great Britain -- 20th century
Scripts (documents) -- Great Britain -- 21st century
Names:
Arvon Foundation
Bexley Hospital
Royal Society of Literature (Great Britain) -- Great Britain
Anne Boleyn, Queen, consort of Henry VIII, King of England, 1507-1536
Bailey, John, 1940-
Clayton, G. H. (Geoffrey Hare), 1884-1957
Cranmer, Thomas, 1489-1556
Cromwell, Thomas, Earl of Essex, 1485?-1540
Diana, Princess of Wales, 1961-1997
Elizabeth II, Queen of Great Britain, 1926-
Henry VIII, King of England, 1491-1547
Holbein, Hans, 1497-1543
Robespierre, Maximilien, 1758-1794
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
Wolsey, Thomas, 1475?-1530
Ali, Monica, 1967-
Atherton, Richard
Athill, Diana
Atkinson, Kate
Bainbridge, Beryl, 1932-2010
Barker, Pat
Barr, Pat, 1934-
Beaven, Derek
Benn, Tony, 1925-
Boylan, Clare
Callil, Carmen
Carey, John, 1934-
Cooper, Jilly
Drabble, Margaret, 1939-
Dunant, Sarah
Dunmore, Helen, 1952-
Epstein, Barbara, 1928-2006
Ewart, Gavin
Flanders, Judith
Gaskill, Malcolm
Gee, Maggie, 1948-
Glaister, Lesley, 1956-
Goff, Martyn
Hackett, Joyce
Hampson, Norman
Hastings, Selina
Haynes, Jane
Hill, Susan, 1942-
Holroyd, Michael
Howard, Elizabeth Jane
Huddleston, Trevor, 1913-1998
Jack, Ian, 1945-
James, P.D.
Kavanagh, P. J. (Patrick Joseph), 1931-
Kneale, Matthew, 1960-
Langley, Lee
Leader, Zachary
Lefanu, Sarah
MacCulloch, Diarmaid
McWilliam Candia
Meehan, Michael, 1948-
Miller, Miranda, 1950-
Moore, Brian, 1921-1999
Moore, Charles, 1956-
Morrison, Blake
Motion, Andrew, 1952-
Mount, Ferdinand, 1939-
Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932-
Palliser, Charles, 1947-
Parker, Peter, 1954-
Parks, Tim
Poulton, Mike
Read, Piers Paul, 1941-
Rogers, Jane, 1952-
Ross, Alan, 1922-2001
Rota, Anthony
Runcie, James, 1959-
Scannell, Vernon
Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg
Simpson, Helen, 1957-
Sontag, Susan, 1933-2004
Stevenson, Anne, 1933 Jan. 3-
Straughan, Peter
Summerscale, Kate, 1965-
Taylor, D. J. (David John), 1960-
Thorpe, Adam, 1956-
Trapido, Barbara
Treglown, Jeremy
Trevor, William, 1928-
Trollope, Joanna
Unsworth, Barry, 1930-
Vansittart, Peter
Vaughn Williams, Ursula
Waugh, Auberon
Westaway, Jane
Willis, James H. (James Herbert), 1928-
Places:
Famagusta (Cyprus)
Foulsham (Norfolk, England)
Hadfield (Derbyshire, England)
Saudi Arabia
South Africa -- Religious life and customs

Access and use

Restrictions:

Open for use by qualified researchers and by appointment. Please contact Reader Services at the Huntington Library for more information.

SEALED: Boxes 47-52: Mantel's diaries are sealed for the lifetime of Mantel's widower, Gerald McEwen.

Terms of access:

The Huntington Library does not require that researchers request permission to quote from or publish images of this material, nor does it charge fees for such activities. The responsibility for identifying the copyright holder, if there is one, and obtaining necessary permissions rests with the researcher.

Preferred citation:

[Identification of item]. Hilary Mantel papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Location of this collection:
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108, US
Contact:
(626) 405-2191
reference@huntington.org
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