Giving flesh to the 'wraiths of violence' : super-realism in the fiction of Hilary Mantel

In this article I would like to explore the complex moral geography of the fiction of Hilary Mantel, one of England's foremost authors. To say 'one of England's foremost authors' is very different from saying 'English writer', a term Mantel thinks a better description of what she is not (2007, 94). This defining of something by what it is not is characteristic of the realism of Mantel's more difficult novels: those evoking the perilous lives of women in working-class or lower middle-class families in the haunted geography of cities on the downturn, or villages in the shabby A-road bisected English countryside.