Nightmares about Fossils: Spectral Children, Colonial Legacies, and Intergenerational Trauma in the Work of Hilary Mantel

This chapter analyses the persistence and significance of the motif of the 'spectral child' in the work of British novelist Hilary Mantel, mapping the political and ethical work it does there. From Mantel's debut duology through to her critically acclaimed Tudor Trilogy, the absent presence of the child who is missing, who is dead, who is ignored or marginalised, or who never was seethes. The analysis is focalised through a reading of Mantel's critically overlooked novel A Change of Climate (1994), in which temporal and geographical shifts between 1950s apartheid-era South Africa and the Bechuanaland Protectorate and 1980s Norfolk expose the reader to a number of children whose 'undeadness' (literal and metaphorical) maps the legacies of a variety of imbricated acts of violence and marginalisation.