When Kate Middleton Stops Throwing Up
Hilary Mantel, the British author whose prize-winning “Wolf Hall,” about the court of Henry VIII, is loathed by a couple of my elderly friends but loved by most others in my acquaintance, has written a piece for the current London Review of Books. The article is titled “Royal Bodies,” and begins: ‘Last summer at the festival in Hay-on-Wye, I was asked to name a famous person and choose a book to give them…I chose Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, and I chose to give her a book published in 2006, by the cultural historian Caroline Weber; it’s called “Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution.” It’s not that I think we’re heading for a revolution. It’s rather that I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung. In those days she was a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore. These days she is a mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions. Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant.’
