MANTEL, Hilary [The Wolf Hall Trilogy:] Wolf Hall; The Mirror & the Light; Bring Up the Bodies.

The Rise and Fall of Cromwell

MANTEL, Hilary [The Wolf Hall Trilogy:] Wolf Hall; The Mirror & the Light; Bring Up the Bodies. London: Fourth Estate. 2009–2020.

[offered with:]

[BINNIE, Sam.] The World of Wolf Hall: A Reading Guide to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies. London: Fourth Estate Books. 2019.

Four volumes, 8vo. Publisher’s black and blue cloth lettered in gilt to spine with rampant lion gilt to spine of Mirror &the Light, in the publisher’s illustrated, unclipped jackets, pictorial endpapers; Reading Guide in publisher’s illustrated wrappers; Wolf Hall: pp. xvii, [1 (blank)], 653, [1 (blank)]; Bring Up the Bodies: xiii, [5], 411, [3]; Mirror & the Light: xiv, [4], 883, [11 (blank)]; Reading Guide: [8], 53, [3]; light shelf wear with slight creases to edges of jackets, minor pushing to spine ends; Wolf Hall: crease to front flap of jacket, edges of textblock very lightly toned, The Mirror & the Light: corners of upper board and tail of lower board slightly bumped; near-fine copies in like jackets and Reading Guide as new.

An attractive set of first editions, first impressions of Hilary Mantel’s masterpieces of historical fiction depicting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell.

Hilary Mantel became the first woman to win the Booker Prize twice, receiving the award for Wolf Hall in 2009 and, three years later, for Bring Up the Bodies. The trilogy, eventually completed in 2020 with The Mirror and the Light, places Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s formidable chief minister, centre-stage, subtly challenging the conventional image of a ruthless and calculating opportunist to reveal a more complex, nuanced, and ultimately sympathetic figure.

In her 2017 Reith Lectures, Mantel argued that the task of historical fiction is not simply reconstruction but ‘a two-way street’, whereby the past illuminates the present even as the present reshapes our understanding of the past. The achievement of the trilogy lies in this ingenious fusion of historical scholarship with psychological immediacy.

Mantel spent five years researching and writing the first volume alone. Her ambition, she later recalled, was not simply historical accuracy but imaginative immersion: to transport the reader to Tudor England without the advantage of hindsight, ‘to be there with them in that hunting party at Wolf Hall, moving forward with imperfect information and perhaps wrong expectations, but in any case, moving forward into a future that is not pre-determined, but where chance and hazard will play a terrific role.’

See ‘Hilary Mantel Discusses Thomas Cromwell’s Past, Presence and Future’, The Guardian (15 Aug 2012).

SKU: 2125284