Margaret Mantel

Her parents—Margaret Foster and Henry Thompson —were of IrishCatholic extraction, descendants of immigrants who had come to work for the textile mills. They were working class of little education, with distant, painful memories...

Margaret Foster (later Thompson, later Mantel), HM 's mother, would have passed the eleven-plus for admission to grammar school, but her teacher's failure to enter her for the exam meant that she left school at...