SOURCE: “The Little Woman Inside,” in London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 5, March 9, 1995, p. 12.

In the following review, Birch perceives Mantel as representative of the post-World War II British generation of authors.

Women of my age, born in the early Fifties and now in our forties, have reached the season of retrospection. We have become—or have not become—wives, wage-earners, mothers, home-makers, gardeners or taxpayers. Our place in post-war history, formed by a procession of notions (often experimental, often contradictory) of what success is for women, has settled into a pattern that can be discerned and appraised. We can begin to compare our lives with those of our mothers. Hilary Mantel, born in 1952, has tried out a number of female identities—more than most of us—and succeeded more than most. She has trained as a lawyer and given it up, she has been a social worker...