SOURCE: “Hilary Mantel: The Novelist in Action,” in Publishers Weekly, October 5, 1998, pp. 60–1.

In the following essay, Richardson overviews Mantel's life and career.

In the late 1970s, Hilary Mantel traveled to Botswana with her husband, a geologist employed by the government geological survey. On a card table on a verandah covered with bougainvillea, using a portable typewriter frequently choked with dust from the Kalahari desert, she turned out two drafts of a first novel, a 350,000-word account of the French Revolution.

Mantel has been using a word processor since the mid-1980s, but she still works from notes written in unlikely places, at bus stops and on station platforms and trains. “I always work outside, if I can,” she says. “It's important to grab the instant thought.”

It's a technique very much in keeping with the peripatetic imagination that fuels her sharply observed novels. Mantel is an especially difficult...