8/18/2023 0 Comments Mr extractor for sale(McEwen tells a good story about their first date in a pub in Manchester. We were just tidying up.” She was an outsider within her family, within her religion, within England, and that gave her this extraordinary fresh perspective on everythingīoth Mantel and McEwen were of Irish-Catholic descent, although they met as teenagers in Cheshire, where they grew up. “We were ready to move, all the removals and things were sorted. Four days later, they would have left for their new home in Kinsale, Ireland. “My last words to her were, ‘I won’t be long.’” Had she survived until midnight, he says, they would have been celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. He went to take some bags to the recycling centre, and when he came back she had collapsed after a massive stroke from which she never recovered. They had been cleaning the flat because they were moving to Ireland. Mantel died at 6 o’clock on the 22nd of September, McEwen says carefully, when we speak on the phone ahead of the memorial. He is keeping that final notebook, he says, “because it contains all kinds of stuff, which I wouldn’t want to be out there, even after I’m dead. She would turn to him not for literary criticism, she said, but for his “reaction as a human being” to her work in progress. She was planning a long piece, a follow-up to Royal Bodies, her controversial 2013 essay for the London Review of Books (in it, she described Kate Middleton as a “jointed doll on which certain rags are hung”). It was written around the time of the Queen’s death, after which Mantel was inundated with requests from newspapers. It was only after she died that he opened the last one. Mantel would leave notebooks and diaries all over the flat in Budleigh Salterton, Devon, where the couple lived for 12 years, but they had an honourable agreement that McEwen would never read them. (Mantel was close friends with the Huntington’s now retired curator of British historical manuscripts Mary Robertson, with whom she was in constant contact.) No one will be able to read the notebooks – divided into manuscript notes and personal diaries – until after McEwen’s death. The rest, along with around 150 A5 notebooks, have been sent to the Huntington Library in California, where her archive is kept. Mantel had written 20,000 words of Provocation, but the two brief paragraphs published here, read at her memorial in Southwark Cathedral this week, are the only ones Gerald McEwen, Mantel’s husband, felt were finished enough to share with the world. “She felt that it was time to get away from the really serious research and the big historical novels, to do something lighter.” “I think she thought, ‘I can just have a whole load of fun,’” says her long-term agent, Bill Hamilton. From 2,000 pages of bloody Tudor pageantry to Austen’s two-inches of ivory, it is a dizzying shift in scale. Even more intriguingly, it was planned as a mischievous Austen mashup, with characters from all her novels making an appearance in unfamiliar guises. We now know the answer to Atwood’s question: Mantel was working on a rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, told from the perspective of the overlooked middle sister Mary Bennet, to be titled Provocation. Aside from her Cromwell novels, Mantel had a habit of confounding expectations, with each new work so different from its predecessor. “I don’t know, but I will miss it.” In this, she spoke for readers around the world, eagerly awaiting a new book from the author of the Wolf Hall trilogy. “W hat might she have written next?” asked Margaret Atwood in her tribute to Hilary Mantel, after the Booker prize-winning novelist’s sudden death in September last year.
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