I saw her one evening when she had just delivered the manuscript for The Mirror and the Light. She felt it was her best book. Her reason for that was to do with the freedom the first two volumes had earned her. In Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies – both of which won the Booker prize – she had worked hard to draw readers in, unsure if they’d stay. Mantel is preparing to leave Devon to set up home with her husband, Gerald McEwen, in Ireland this month, having previously expressed her shame at the British government’s treatment of migrants and asylum seekers and her desire to become an Irish citizen. She has become a byword for a particular kind of intensely-felt, brilliantly subtle exploration of the past. Though best known as a historical novelist, Mantel was less concerned with history than with its shape-shifting relative, recollection. Between her dazzling scholarship and frequent hilarity of her dialogue lay her true subject: “the operation”, as she once phrased it, “of memory”. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. All of England lies at his feet, ripe for innovation and religious reform. But as fortune’s wheel turns, Cromwell’s enemies are gathering in the shadows. The result is a collection of ambiguous, disquieting images in which the present rubs up against the past, accompanied by excerpts from the novels, some taken from deleted scenes that, thrillingly for Mantel fans, have never before been released.

She made headlines a year ago, when she suggested the monarchy could be facing “the endgame”, and may not “outlast William”; and a lecture she gave in 2013, entitled Royal Bodies, in which she described the then Duchess of Cambridge as a “plastic princess”, caused an outcry. Many people wilfully misread her criticism of what she explained as “the way we maltreat royal persons, making them one superhuman, and yet less than human”. HarperCollins confirmed she had died on Thursday “suddenly yet peacefully”, surrounded by close family and friends. The present rubs up against the past, accompanied by excerpts from the novels, some taken from deleted scenes that, thrillingly for Mantel fans, have never before been released. Among other things, it is an interrogation of the way we interact with history; of the gaps in the record; its elusive nature; and its unexpected resonances with our contemporary lives’ Guardian Critical Praise Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire on 6 July 1952. She studied law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University, and went on to become a social work assistant in a geriatric hospital. Mantel married the geologist Gerald McEwan in 1972. The couple divorced in 1981 but remarried in 1982. In 1974, she began writing a novel about the French Revolution, which was published in 1992 as A Place of Greater Safety. In 1977, Mantel and her husband moved to Botswana, living there for five years. Later, they spent four years in Saudi Arabia, returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. In The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell recalls the same scene years later. The main action is identical but he remembers himself as more vulnerable. A threatening man, who wasn’t in the first memory, crushes the young Cromwell’s hand. People are crammed together, and the stench of burning flesh is so strong they vomit at their feet.When asked by the Financial Times earlier this month whether she believed in an afterlife, Mantel said she did, but that she could not imagine how it might work. “However, the universe is not limited by what I can imagine,” she said. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels make 99 per cent of contemporary literary fiction feel utterly pale and bloodless by comparison’ The Times Every stroke of the pen releases a thousand pictures inside the writer’s head. This book has made some of them visible.’ Hilary Mantel I am, as I think a lot of authors are, concerned about the speed at which we are consuming history now, the way that the past, the very recent past, is being made into a version and real-life people walking around have to live with their representatives and so on,” she says, not naming names, but nodding when I mention the TV series The Crown and Kenneth Branagh’s imminent appearance as Boris Johnson in This England.

At that stage, with The Mirror and the Light, the third in her trilogy, still several years from completion, “there was a long, long way to go. And, for me, it was just the refreshment I needed. It was more than a supplement, it was something really essential that I needed to do,” she says. Some immensely striking and suggestive images followed: a ghostly hound in Richmond Park, which brought to mind Cromwell’s memories of dogs circling, scenting burned flesh; Boleyn’s robes, laid out on a table like a shroud in Lambeth Palace; a curling tong lying plugged in on the floor during filming at Cromwell’s mansion in the City of London, Austin Friars, looking for all the world like an instrument of torture. There it is again – the interplay between the past and the present day. At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Zola said, ‘’In my view you cannot claim to have really seen something till you have photographed it.’‘Mantel has redefined what the historical novel is capable of . . . Taken together, her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century’ Observer, Stephanie Merritt’ - Mantel's Cromwell is an omnicompetent figure, "at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." Fluent in many languages, learned, witty and thoughtful, he's also an intimidating physical presence; Wolsey fondly compares him to "one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes". This makes him an ideal emissary for Wolsey's project of liquidating some smaller monasteries to fund a school and an Oxford college. But self-advancement isn't Cromwell's only motive. He's disgusted by the waste and superstition he encounters, and takes a materialist view of relics and indulgences. The feudal mindset of Wolsey's rival grandees seems equally outdated to him: jibes at his lowly origins bounce off his certainty that noble blood and feats of arms now count for less than lines of credit and nicely balanced books.

Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have been the only consecutive novels by a writer to have both won the Booker prize, and Mantel was closely involved in their transition to stages in Stratford, London and New York, also seeing them adapted for BBC television. She also published, in 2014, a collection of short stories, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

The first half of the novel, built around Wolsey's fall from power, details Cromwell's domestic setup at Austin Friars and introduces the major players in Tudor politics. Without clobbering the reader with the weight of her research, Mantel works up a 16th-century world in which only a joker would call for cherries in April or lettuce in December, and where hearing an unlicensed preacher is an illicit thrill on a par with risking syphilis. The civil wars that brought the Tudors to the throne still make older people shudder, bringing Henry's obsession with producing a male heir into focus. And the precarious nature of early modern life is brought home by the abrupt deaths of Cromwell's wife and daughters, carried off by successive epidemics in moving but unsentimentally staged scenes. Cromwell asks if he can bury his elder daughter with a copybook she's written her name in; "the priest says he has never heard of such a thing". Because she dealt with big historical moments it was easy for some people to forget that Mantel was often joking. Her propensity for mischief and her ear for irony were peerless. The main target of her short story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is not Thatcher but the narrator, a cosy liberal just popping some Perrier in the fridge when a gunman rings her doorbell. She thinks he’s a photographer, trying to capture the prime minister emerging from an eye hospital in Windsor. “How much will you get for a good shot?” she asks, letting him size up the view from her window. “Life without parole,” the man replies. She laughs: “It’s not a crime.” “That’s my feeling,” he says as he assembles his rifle. Here’s an example. In Wolf Hall, after a threatening encounter with Thomas More in which More accuses him of “negotiating with heretics”, Cromwell remembers seeing a heretic burned alive. As a boy of about eight, Cromwell has run away from his violent father and got caught up in a crowd he thinks is heading towards a fair. But the roaring crowd is gathering around an old woman, “the Loller”, who is singed to death before their eyes. Bill Hamilton, who was Mantel’s agent throughout her career, said it had been “the greatest privilege” to work with the writer. “Her wit, stylistic daring, creative ambition and phenomenal historical insight mark her out as one of the greatest novelists of our time.” Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon said: “It is impossible to overstate the significance of the literary legacy Hilary Mantel leaves behind. Her brilliant Wolf Hall trilogy was the crowning achievement in an outstanding body of work. Rest in peace.”

I think simply because I prize the long view so much. And that’s why I won’t make the parallels. I think that if you do, it turns real people into these kind of fantasy figures and unfortunately, they’re not. They’re real, present and dangerous.” In 1990 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 she was awarded a CBE and in 2014 a DBE. Among other things, it is an interrogation of the way we interact with history; of the gaps in the record; its elusive nature; and its unexpected resonances with our contemporary lives. For Ben Miles, with whom Mantel co-adapted The Mirror and the Light for its run last year at the Gielgud theatre in London, the project was part of a continuing collaboration of nearly a decade’s standing. The three of them began to visit places together, one of them often acting as a decoy to the helpful guides intent on showing them the official version. Reuniting the creative team from the BAFTA and Golden Globe winning first series, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light will be directed by seven-time BAFTA award winner Peter Kosminsky (The Undeclared War, The State), adapted for television by Academy award nominee Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Frank) and produced by Colin Callender’s Playground (The Undeclared War, All Creatures Great and Small) and Company Pictures (Van Der Valk, Blood).Susanne Simpson, Executive Producer of Masterpiece says: “I am incredibly proud to bring Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light to Masterpiece and the American audience. It is thrilling that such brilliant actors as Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis will reprise their roles for this final chapter of Thomas Cromwell’s story. The level of excellence on and off screen for this series is incomparable.” At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Zola said, ‘’In my view you cannot claim to have really seen something till you have photographed it.’’ The act of photographing, at least for a moment, distinguishes its object and estranges it from its context . . . Every stroke of the pen releases a thousand pictures inside the writer’s head. This book has made some of them visible.’ Hilary Mantel