Hilary Mantel on Mr Darcy: read an exclusive extract from the Wolf Hall writer’s Austen satire

“What might she have written next?” asked Margaret Atwood in her tribute to Hilary Mantel, after the Booker prize-winning novelist’s sudden death in September last year. “I don’t know, but I will miss it.” In this, she spoke for readers around the world, eagerly awaiting a new book from the author of the Wolf Hall trilogy. Aside from her Cromwell novels, Mantel had a habit of confounding expectations, with each new work so different from its predecessor.

We now know the answer to Atwood’s question: Mantel was working on a rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, told from the perspective of the overlooked middle sister Mary Bennet, to be titled Provocation. Even more intriguingly, it was planned as a mischievous Austen mashup, with characters from all her novels making an appearance in unfamiliar guises. From 2,000 pages of bloody Tudor pageantry to Austen’s two-inches of ivory, it is a dizzying shift in scale. “I think she thought, ‘I can just have a whole load of fun,’” says her long-term agent, Bill Hamilton. “She felt that it was time to get away from the really serious research and the big historical novels, to do something lighter.”

Mantel had written 20,000 words of Provocation, but the two brief paragraphs published here, read at her memorial in Southwark Cathedral this week, are the only ones Gerald McEwen, Mantel’s husband, felt were finished enough to share with the world. The rest, along with around 150 A5 notebooks, have been sent to the Huntington Library in California, where her archive is kept. (Mantel was close friends with the Huntington’s now retired curator of British historical manuscripts , with whom she was in constant contact.) No one will be able to read the notebooks – divided into manuscript notes and personal