Hilary Mantel

This fictional portrait of Henry VIII's scheming aide Thomas Cromwell — the first volume of Mantel's celebrated trilogy — won the Booker Prize in 2009. “'Wolf ...

But for now I am thinking of the poignant ending of “The Mirror and the Light,” the final book in the Cromwell trilogy. (For her part, Mantel said she was “bemused” at the suggestion that “the police should interest themselves in the case of a fictional assassination of a person who was already dead.”) Having helped effect the deaths of so many of Henry’s enemies, Cromwell finds that he is to meet the same fate. He feels for an opening, blinded, looking for a door: tracking the light along the wall.” As her agent, Bill Hamilton, said upon the news of her death: “She had so many great novels ahead of her.” There is a lot more to read, and reread. Though the themes of women suffering from pain, isolation and domestic weariness recur in her fiction, she didn’t make her own history the focus of her persona; she was not one to seek pity. For me, her books show that great literature, the kind that marries meticulous craft and deep understanding of human nature, can require work on the part of the reader. It was a shock to see her speak in person and realize how funny she was. Dead for more than 400 years, reduced to caricature as a thug and a brute in the famous Holbein portrait that hangs in the Frick Museum, Cromwell here feels shimmeringly alive, full of pathos. There were nine other novels, demonstrating her ability to write in a range of styles about various subjects and in various time periods. She brings great precision to her writing, as opaque as it sometimes feels, and asks the same of us in our reading. At first, the prose is disorienting.

The beloved writer of the Wolf Hall trilogy and Beyond Black has died. Here, leading contemporaries pay tribute.

I find her in the blue-eyed model of a jackdaw that eyes me from the mantelpiece, and the deck of tarot cards I keep close to hand; I find her in the box of opioids I store under my bed in case pain returns to my life; I find her in the postcard of Cranmer she sent me once, which I have pinned above my desk. I met her only a couple of times, and she was unfailingly kind and generous, but I was as flustered in her presence as if I were meeting royalty – which, in a way, I think I was. The year 2015, as it turned out, was not as good to me as she had hoped it would be, nor were the years that followed: I became ill and endured tormenting pain, so that her writing on bodily suffering arrived for me like despatches from a traveller who had entered a bad land long before me and had left a map and a light. At the end of June, when I did a Zoom with her for the 92nd Street Y, she was filled with excitement at the prospect of moving to Ireland and spoke of the house she had bought in Kinsale. She was also brilliant, witty company with a distinctive mode of scepticism that was all her own. As a person, she was unfailingly generous, making time to support and champion the work of other writers. Her fierce intelligence, sense of humour and her tremendous, clear-eyed stoicism seemed somehow conjoined and enshrined in her writer’s life and the enduring novels that she wrote. It is a matter of immense sadness that I will never again hear the words “new novel by Hilary Mantel”, and the only consolation is the books that she has left us with. It was her intention to reclaim her European citizenship by way of the Irish passport to which she was entitled. Her last interviews returned to the fact that she came from a family of immigrants. It was always a pleasure to read such a smart, deft, meticulous, thoughtful writer, and one with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature - and a pleasure to review her too, which I did both early and late. A Place of Greater Safety was an eye-opener about the French Revolution, and the Cromwell trilogy was a well-known stunner.