April 21, 2023, 12:03pm
Hilary Mantel died last September at age 70, but a memorial service just this week revealed something of use to those who miss her words. The Guardian’s Saturday Paper will be publishing excerpts from an unpublished project mashing together Jane Austen’s works.
“She was having the greatest fun dissecting a literary icon,” her literary agent Bill Hamilton said at the service, per The Guardian.
Imagine the post-modernist-Austenite novel that would have been! Imagine the Mantel treatment being given to poor Charlotte Lucas, not-quite-good-enough-and-not-rich-enough and doomed to serve as vessel for the world’s most boring man, or the Mantel inflections for various classes of idiot: Miss Bates, Mr Collins, Lucy Steele, and on. Picture a whoomph of manor intrigue as laid out by the Wolf Hall mastermind!
I shall be happy for whatever crumbs we can get.
