'A plastic princess designed to breed': Bring Up the Bodies author Hilary Mantel's venomous attack on Kate Middleton
Hilary Mantel calls Duchess of Cambridge 'bland' and 'machine made' Said impression of future queen was 'jointed doll on which rags are hung' Author said Duchess was 'born to breed' and a 'plastic princess'
A best-selling author who has based her literary career on writing about the Royal family has launched a bitter attack on the Duchess of Cambridge. Hilary Mantel used her position among the novel-writing elite to make an astonishing and venomous critique of Kate. Mantel, whose latest books are set in England's Tudor court and have appeared on the New York Times bestsellers' list, dismissed Kate as a ‘machine-made’ princess, ‘designed by committee’.
Attack: Author Hilary Mantel called the Duchess of Cambridge a 'shop window mannequin' who was 'designed by a committee' with a plastic smile.
Mantel, 60, also scorned her as a personality-free ‘shop window mannequin’ with a ‘plastic smile’.
She compared Kate unfavorably to both Anne Boleyn – one of her historical heroines – and to Princess Diana, insisting both had more personality.
She said Kate had gone from being a ‘jointed doll on which certain rags are hung’ to a woman whose ‘only point and purpose’ was to give birth.
Mantel said Kate ‘appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished’. She said the Duchess was quite unlike Anne Boleyn, who was ‘a power player, a clever and determined woman'.
Mantel contrasted her appearance to Prince William’s mother, Diana, ‘whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture’.
Mantel, the author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, the acclaimed novels which detail the failure of Henry VIII’s wives to produce an heir, used a lecture to examine the prospects for the future queen consort.
Mantel said that when she first saw Kate Middleton, she struck her as ‘a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore'.
A HISTORY OF HILARY
Writer Hilary Mantel was born in Glossop in Derbyshire, England in 1952.
She is the first woman to receive the prestigious British literary award, the Man Booker Prize, twice. She bagged the first of the awards in 2009 for Wolf Hall, part one of her trilogy about Henry VIII’s adviser Thomas Cromwell.
The second installment of the trilogy, Bring Up The Bodies won both the Booker Prize and the Costa Book Of The Year Award last year.
Ms Mantel’s comments on the Duchess of Cambridge’s appearance comes shortly after she spoke about having body issues of her own.
Ms Mantel went from a size ten to a size 20 in nine months after she was diagnosed with severe endometrosis at the age of 27.
The treatment, which included surgery removing her womb leaving her infertile, caused her to gain four stone.
The 60-year-old author said she sometimes dreams of being thin again. Prince William’s wife-to-be was as ‘painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character’. She added: ‘Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners. ‘She looks like a nicely brought up young lady, with “please” and “thank you” part of her vocabulary.’
Mantel spoke of Kate’s appearance in her first official portrait since marrying William, painted by Paul Emsley, which was unveiled last month. She said: ‘Her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off.’
Mantel went on to say that female Royals were ‘at the most basic... breeding stock, collections of organs.’
St James’s Palace last week criticized a magazine for printing pictures of Kate’s baby bump taken during a break on the Caribbean island of Mustique.
And they were furious last year when pictures of her topless on holiday were printed in Italy – saying ‘a red line had been crossed'.
But Mantel suggested Kate could have few complaints about private pictures of her being taken on holiday – observing: ‘The royal body exists to be looked at.’ ‘Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.’
Mantel gave the London Review of Books lecture ‘Undressing Anne Boleyn’ at the British Museum on the February 4. The full version of her speech is to be published in the latest edition of the London Review of Books, out on February 21.
Official bodies: Hilary Mantel said the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge should not complain about invasion of privacy when pictures are taken of them on private holidays as a 'royal body exists to be looked at'
Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine, said Mantel’s comments were unfair. She said that although Diana had at first seemed ‘bland’, later ‘we learned about all the troubles of her marriage and her personality began to shine through. Kate might yet come into her own.’ 'She's a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own'
She added that Kate’s duties meant she ‘can’t do anything that might reveal (her) personality.
‘They have to be nice to everyone. They are probably stupefyingly bored but they can’t appear to be having anything other than a nice time.’
The Duchess chose yesterday to give an insight into the causes that she will support, hailing the start of a project which will see one of her charities receive a huge financial boost from a philanthropic organization.