Mantel\'s \'Plastic\' Princess Remarks Ruffle Feathers in England

Hilary Mantel has won two Man Booker Prizes and huge sales for her novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,”with their acidic portrait of the doomed schemer Anne Boleyn. But her recent comments about another dark-haired royal wife, the Duchess of Cambridge, are getting some less than flattering reviews.

In a lecture delivered earlier this month at the British Museum, Ms. Mantel said that the former Kate Middleton, when she first appeared on the scene, seemed to have been “designed by a committee and built by craftsmen,” with a “plastic smile” and “as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.”

The press, cottoning on to the speech earlier this week after it was published in the London Review of Books, smelled a catfight. The Daily Mail called it “an astonishing and venomous attack.” The more liberal Independent weighed in with a side-by-side comparison of the two women’s experience, education and status as “style icons” (with a quote from Ms. Mantel’s wry account of shopping in “fat-lady shops”). Even Prime Minister David Cameron took a time-out during a trip to India to criticize Ms. Mantel’s remarks as “completely misguided and completely wrong.”

The novelist has hardly been without her defenders, with commentators noting that the remarks a! bout the duchess were about the media’s depiction of her, and took up only a few paragraphs of a long rumination on Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and the nature of monarchy â€" none of which, as the columnist Hadley Freeman put it in the Guardian, could be “souped up into some kind of non-existent squabble between two high-profile women (Boleyn being, famously if rather inconveniently, dead.)”

Ms. Mantel has yet to comment publicly on the affair. But her essay contains what might be the seed of self-explanation, if not quite apology. After her remarks about Kate, she recalls a close encounter with Queen Elizabeth at a literary event at Buckingham Palace.

“I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones,” she wrote, adding: “For a moment she had turned back fro a figurehead into the young woman she was, before monarchy froze her and made her a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at. And I felt sorry then. I wanted to apologize. I wanted to say: it’s nothing personal, it’s monarchy I’m staring at.”