One of Britain’s most celebrated authors has launched a withering attack on Britain’s Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, branding her a “shop-window mannequin” with a plastic smile whose only role in life is to breed.
As painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana
Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday described award-winning writer Hilary Mantel as “misguided” after she likened the former Kate Middleton to a “machine-made” doll, devoid of personality.
Her comments about the 31-year-old wife of William, second-in-line to the British throne, divided public opinion, with newspapers condemning Mantel as “venomous”, “cruel” and “staggeringly rude”.
Supporters said her words had been taken out of context from a long analysis of society’s centuries-old obsession with the appearance and fertility of royal wives that ended with a plea to “back off and not be brutes” to them.
“I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung,” Mantel said in a lecture at the British Museum in London earlier this month in which she spoke about her changing view of the princess.
“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.”
Speaking during a visit to India, Cameron said Mantel was wrong and that people should do more to encourage a young royal who is a “fantastic ambassador for Britain”.
“Mantel writes great books, but I think what she’s said about Kate Middleton is completely misguided and completely wrong,” Cameron told Sky News.
Mantel, who last year became the first Briton to twice win the Man Booker prize for fiction, referred to the princess’s severe morning sickness during the early stage of her pregnancy and said her role was to provide an heir.
“Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant. They will find that this young woman's life until now was nothing, her only point and purpose being to give birth,” Mantel said in the lecture organised by the London Review of Books on February 4. The literary magazine reprinted the lecture on its website this week.
She also said that the duchess was “selected for her role... because she was irreproachable”, contrasting her with the “emotional incontinence” of William’s late mother, Princess Diana.
“As painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana,” Mantel said.
The author’s agent and a royal spokeswoman declined to comment.
A smiling Duchess of Cambridge showed no sign of being affected by the row when she visited an addiction charity in London.
Wearing a grey wrap dress, she crossed her hands over her small baby bump as she chatted to charity workers.
Well-wishers who waited in the late winter sunshine for a glimpse of her expressed sympathy.
“It’s totally uncalled for,” said Morag Hamilton, 36, from London. “It’s a shame.”
Mantel, 60, is best known for her historical novel Wolf Hall, about the rise of blacksmith’s son Thomas Cromwell to the pinnacle of power in King Henry VIII’s court. Her follow-up Bring Up the Bodies recounted Anne Boleyn’s fall from grace.