How Hilary Mantel came to loathe the England she mythologised

Spring reads 3/

Mantel shows Thomas More as a tortured fanatic rather than a heroic Catholic martyr

As it is Easter Day, here is my account of how the rise of the nationalist right persuaded Hilary Mantel, one of England’s greatest modern novelists, to change her view of England’s history. By the end of her life, she wanted only to leave her country behind. As with so many of us, Brexit made it impossible for Mantel to believe in the consoling myths the English tell themselves.

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In his introduction to a posthumous collection of Hilary Mantel’s essays, her editor Nicholas Pearson makes an announcement as shocking in its way as the news that the white cliffs of Dover have crumbled into the Channel or that the ravens have fled the Tower of London.

Mantel, who more than any other modern artist, reinterpreted the myths of English nationalism, had given up on England.

Pearson tells us that, when she died unexpectedly in September 2022, Mantel was a week away from moving from Budleigh Salterton on the Devon coast to Kinsale in Ireland.

Mantel wanted “a reconnection with her Irish Catholic roots,” Pearson says. But it was more than that. She could no longer stand what the Conservatives had done to the UK. Mantel and her husband Gerald McEwen were moving to Ireland “in part [as] an attempt to re-establish European citizenship in the wake of Brexit.”

There are two types of nationalism. The first the British have endured to excess: the bellowing, chest-beating, braggart nationalism that brought us the Brexit disaster, which Mantel so deplored.

Braggart nationalism was Boris Johnson assuring us we could be world-beaters just because we were British. It was David Davis, Michael Gove and every other leading right-wing politician promising the fooled and fleeced British public that European political and business leaders would be desperate to cut favourable deals with the mighty UK. It was the belief that outright lying to the public about Brexit bringing billions to the NHS and saving us from mass immigration was justified in the name of the greater nationalist good.