Two years later, she re-married her ex-husband (they remained together for the rest of her life), and she followed him on a new job in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, where they lived for four years. She returned to England, got a hysterectomy and a divorce. Her doctors insisted this affliction was psychosomatic, prescribing anti-depressants, sedatives, and antipsychotics, the last of which, she wrote, make you feel like “every fiber of your being is possessed by panic.” In Botswana, she decided to research her symptoms herself and soon realized that she suffered from endometriosis. Mantel-who studied law and was employed as a social worker before leaving England in 1977, when her husband accepted a job in Botswana-suffered for most of her 20s from unexplained pain and fatigue.

She believed this force invaded her, and never truly left her alone afterwards-even the final sentence of her final book of stories published in America, this year’s Learning to Talk, returns to this presence, which “wrapped a strangling hand around my life.” At any rate, it seemed more present and powerful than God. I cannot move.” What was it? The Devil, probably. “It is as high as a child of two,” she wrote in her memoir, 2003’s Giving Up the Ghost. Mantel gave up on all that at the age of 12, but her apostasy really began when she was seven and encountered a fundamentally indescribable presence just beyond her back yard. Born in 1952, she grew up in the particularly dreary part of northern England, a place where the people were “distrustful and life-refusing,” but where the authority of the church promised an escape from Satan and the general nastiness of life as long as you submitted to it, unquestioning. This presented a conundrum to anyone raised Catholic, as Mantel was. Long before she became a bestselling novelist (and two-time Booker Prize winner) writing about Thomas Cromwell, Hilary Mantel, who died Thursday at the age of 70, had learned two things by direct experience: that authority cannot be counted on and that evil is real.

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