In the obituaries and articles that have appeared since Hilary Mantel’s death on September 22, the focus has been, understandably, on her historical novels, especially the great trilogy that began with Wolf Hall. The scale and intimacy of her portrait of Thomas Cromwell and his world, the wealth of historical fact translated into present-tense closeup: all this has been rightly admired. But Mantel was more than adept in briefer forms, and much of her wisdom and flair can be celebrated at the level of the sentence.
