Hilary Mantel’s novel fragment based on Jane Austen

The last book Hilary Mantel did before her death was designed to put characters by writer Jane Austen into new context. Now the fragment of the novel has become known.

BAt the funeral service for novelist Hilary Mantel, the literary world has now learned what it has been missing: a novel about Jane Austen’s world, written from the perspective of Mary Bennet, the book-loving middle sister of Pride and Prejudice, who wrote it cutting means how proud she is of the “profundity of her thoughts” collected from books. Before her death last September, Mantel had only revealed that she wanted to tackle a new historical novel, set in the eighteenth century, after her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. According to her agent Bill Hamilton, the fragment left behind can be described less as an unfinished manuscript than as a manuscript that has just begun.

Longtime publisher Nicholas Pearson speaks for the large Mantel community when he expresses his dismay that he will never be able to read the entirety of the book, entitled Provocation. Six weeks before his author’s death, she had told him passionately about the project and her lifelong love for Jane Austen. Mantel had decided to emigrate to Ireland, the land of her ancestors – driven by the need to be European again after Brexit. This move was delayed by the pandemic. Person says that Mantel’s plan was to pursue the novel as “a fresh adventure in her life” in her new adopted home on Ireland’s west coast. It didn’t come to that anymore.