She was the author who breathed new life into the British historical novel, while at the same time winning a wide international audience and renewing a literary genre in which her compatriot Barry Unsworth had previously excelled internationally. Lady Hilary Mandel passed away yesterday at the age of 70, in poor health (the severe endometriosis that plagued her from a young age led to an early menopause at 27 and chronic problems thereafter that would not leave her alone until her death), but dynamic , creative spirit.

I distinctly remember in August 2010 at the Edinburgh Book Festival she spoke with poignant humor and unbridled seriousness to a packed house (with a £10 ticket please) about her masterpiece The Wolf Hall (in Greek from Papyrus editions). , a multi-layered narrative of the troubled, dark England of Cromwell’s time.

The novel won the Booker Prize, but it was followed by its second part, the equally amazing Education of the Bodies (2012), which also won the Costa Prize, but another Booker. Mandel thus became the first British writer to win the Booker Prize twice, and the first with two novels, the second being a continuation of the first. In 2020, the third part of the trilogy was released, now Mirror and Light, which managed to get into the shortlist of the same award.

She was the first British woman to win two Booker Prizes for Wolf Hall and Raise the Bodies.

Mandel has also excelled in works set in modern times, such as the much-discussed short story “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher” (in Greek, also written by Papyrus), but she is unsurpassed in transposing the action to another time, even when the narrative of her material is purely scientific. popular. Her “masculine” writing pairs brilliantly with a more “feminine” sensibility and insight, especially when it comes to the ways in which History leaves its marks on the body – and of course on the female body, an aspect that, according to her scholars, she has a hard time separates himself from his personal suffering.

Raised Catholic, she adopted her adoptive father’s surname as her biological father left home when he divorced her mother. He departed early from the Roman Catholic faith, but insisted that as a mental record (mainly through constant guilt) she marked him for life.

Mandel studied law at the London School of Economics and the University of Sheffield, married the geologist Gerald McEwan, with whom they lived for several years in Africa and Saudi Arabia, but took up writing early: in 1974, she wrote the novel A Place of Greater Security, which takes place during the French Revolution, but which was released much later, in 1992, and received an award. In 1998 he published the excellent Giant O’Brien (Nefelis), inspired by the true story of the giant Charles Burne (or O’Brien), who made a career in 1780 in so-called freak shows. It is worth looking at her other books published in our language.