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Hilary Mantel Reviews “A Life of One's Own/An Experiment in Leisure” (1986)

Hilary Mantel: Journeys Into the Interior - A Life of One's Own by Joanna Field; An Experiment in Leisure by Joanna Field

And though she says that she hates ‘dowdy, arty women,’ one somehow imagines this pocket; it must belong to a garment like the Woolfian cardigan that Edith Hope wears in Hotel du Lac. She frees herself from the ‘drive after achievement’ which she inevitably associates with the masculine part of human nature; instead she cultivates a willed passivity, a renunciation of conscious effort. She recalls that when Purun Bhagat in the Jungle Book gave up all his riches, and wandered the world with a begging bowl, the wild animals came to him without fear, and so, she says, ‘the ideas I needed for my work would come silently nosing into my mind after I had given up all attempts to look for them.’ This is a common experience, but all the clichés of pop psychology had to be formulated by some suffering soul, before they could be bandied about at cocktail parties.

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