Remembrances of British author Hilary Mantel, on Twitter and beyond

Historian Simon Schama called her “one of the very greatest of our writers; poetic and profound prose with an incomparable feel for the texture of history.”

Novelist and editor Gabriel Roth called “Wolf Hall” “one of the greatest novels,” and put a dizzying spin on its construction:

The word “genius” appeared often on Twitter, but “generous” wasn’t far behind. It was clear that Mantel left a lasting impression on not just readers but on journalists who interviewed her and authors who received her support. Hillary Kelly, for example, recalled the experience of losing an entire interview with Mantel to a “faulty recorder,” only to have Mantel volunteer to have the whole conversation again.

The novelist Stephen May was one of several writers who recalled Mantel getting in touch to offer encouragement about their work.

“She leaves a powerful legacy in her writing,” May wrote, “but also she led an emblematic writer’s life. Do the work, focus on that and help others when you can.”

Lucy Caldwell called it “one of the greatest joys of my own writing life” when Mantel unexpectedly got in touch to praise Caldwell’s novel “These Days.” “Even better was the excuse to write back to her and to tell her how much her work meant to me — how long and deeply I’d loved it.”

Mantel became a household literary name after the publication of “Wolf Hall” (2009), a novel that imagined the life of Thomas Cromwell, who became the closest adviser to Henry VIII. That book and its sequel, “Bring Up the Bodies,” both won the prestigious Booker Prize, making Mantel the first woman to win the award twice. The last book in the Cromwell trilogy, “The Mirror & the Light,” was a finalist for the Booker.

“The contradictions and the awkwardness — that’s what gives historical fiction its value,” Mantel told the Paris Review in 2015. “Finding a shape, rather than imposing a shape. And allowing the reader to live with the ambiguities. Thomas Cromwell is the character with whom that’s most essential. He’s almost a case study in ­ambiguity.”

Those books sold millions of copies, but Mantel had established a reputation among critics and writers well before then, including for other works of historical fiction. “A Place of Greater Safety,” a novel about the French Revolution that runs to more than 700 pages, was the first book Mantel wrote, but it wasn’t published until later in her career. When she wasn’t inspired by history, Mantel often wrote about the supernatural. “Beyond Black,” a realistically toned novel, was set in a world of psychics and clairvoyants. Reviewing it for the Guardian in 2005, Fay Weldon wrote of Mantel: “She’s witty, ironic, intelligent and, I suspect, haunted. This is a book out of the unconscious, where the best novels come from.”

Mantel memorably described her initial haunting in her memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost,” which the New York Times named one of the 10 best memoirs of the past 50 years. She recalled encountering one morning, when she was a young girl, a spirit of some sort in her yard. “It is as high as a child of two,” she wrote. “It has no edges, no mass, no dimension, no shape except the formless; it moves. I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me, and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body.”

The writer Sam Knight was another who warmly recounted Mantel’s generosity, and he ended by suggesting that Mantel’s experience with the supernatural might not be over. “What a wonderful ghost she will be,” he wrote.