HILARY MANTEL (b.1952)
The Mirror & the Light. London: Fourth Estate, 2020.
First edition of the triumphant conclusion to Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy, annotated with 4,298 words on 159 pages. The Mirror & the Light is the third in Mantel's celebrated trilogy of novels on the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, covering the last four years of his life, from the death of Anne Boleyn in 1536 until Cromwell's own execution in 1540. It was critically praised, and won the 2021 Walter Scott Prize: like its predecessors, it was the subject of a stage adaptation by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Mantel's extensive and meticulous annotations record source information both from books and conversations with historians, add further historical details ('the London cat of the day was black & white. Tabby cats were exotic & sold for £5.0') and inspirations for imagined details (for a book: 'I magpie details from auction catalogues'; noting elsewhere in several instances that invented characters are based on understudies in the stage versions), and occasionally remarking on interesting characters or storylines that she was forced to omit ('some things just don't belong in a novel'); she also corrects a number of errata. Some annotations are engagingly personal: 'Novelist's nightmare: imagine how heart sank at the need to incorporate into the cast not just another Thomas, but ANOTHER THOMAS HOWARD. / And how heart soared on finding the verse where he calls himself "Tom Truth"'. Others reveal significant insights into her characters, as of Henry: 'He was a bad man, in many ways, but he wasn't a cynic. He had an active conscience – an unpredictable & dangerous one'. The annotations conclude with an epigraph recording the writing of the last pages of the book, signed ('Hilary') and dated 'Sept 2020, Devon'.

Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine letter in gilt, dust jacket. Three printed items loosely inserted: bookmark of Kenyon College Bookstore, printed promotional leaf for the RSC production of Bring Up the Bodies, and the V&A campaign brochure 'Save the Wolsey Angels' (two of these annotated).

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