ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2017, Hilary Mantel delivered the BBC’s prestigious Reith Lectures. Mantel’s work frequently enacts the problems of narrative as truth-telling or bearing witness, whether to personal, familial or historical events. While ghosts, benign or malign, are everywhere in Mantel’s writing, it would be a false step to label her work ‘gothic’. Where she does employ the gothic mode it is often ironic or dealing in a horror of such grim mundanity that it hardly warrants the spurious glamour ‘gothic’ might suggest. Mantel’s innovative mode of representation of that complex past has been the most-commented upon aspect of her writing, most specifically her use of the historic present and of the extremely close third person. Mantel’s treatment of the past involves assuming the voices of historical figures and translating them for a modern ear, but in a manner very different to a writer such as Peter Ackroyd.
