An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel
Posted in Other fiction, Reading Reviewed at 12:00 on 4 August 2026
Penguin, 1996, 254 p.
This evocation of the late 1960s and early 1970s is narrated from the perspective of her later life by Carmel McBain and charts the relationships between herself, her childhood companion Karina, and later school and college friend Julia(nne) Lipcott over those years.
Every weekday Carmel accompanied to school her close neighbour Karina, the kind of good girl other mothers held up as an example, but whose parents had a tragic background in the then relatively recent Second World War in Europe. Karina may not be quite what they think, though, as Carmel observed her hanging round with rough boys at the bus station.
Carmel’s mother, prompted by a teacher at Carmel’s school, became fixated on her daughter gaining a place at the Holy Redeemer, a school no-one from her neighbourhood has yet attended. However, Karina also sits the entrance exam – and sails through.
Carmel’s Catholic background is always a nagging influence. At the Holy Redeemer she imbibes the thought that “bodies are encumbrance, a necessary evil.” Of Bonfire Night, she tells us, “If you’re a Catholic you don’t burn Guy Fawkes; the Pope says you mustn’t.”
Most of the story, however, is set at Tonbridge Hall, the college the three girls attend after leaving the Holy Redeemer, and an institution plagued with dire, unappetising food. This is an intense environment where the young women converse about who is engaged, who is on the pill, or pregnant, or thinks they might be pregnant, or has just discovered that she isn’t pregnant. This aspect of the novel did remind me of the May of Teck Club in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means. The climax of An Experiment in Love also bears some comparison with that book. Mantel is a much more lucid writer than Spark, though.
However, being of their time, most of the students are preparing for life with a husband.
Partway through the novel Carmel says this is a story about appetite – “in its many aspects and dimensions” and that women carry the faculty for love into later life. “Men will never understand it until till they stop confusing love with sex, which will be never.” Carmel tells us she loves multiple women, but not in a sexual sense.
The whole is infused with a forthright feminism. “There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, inbuilt, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.”
“When men decided women could be educated, they educated them on the male plan” (schools with mottoes and school songs, muddy team games, collars, ties) but always inferior. “Women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it…… Our schools kept from us, for as long as they could, the dangerous, disruptive, upsetting knowledge of our own female nature.”
The Secretary of State for Education visits the college – and the food suddenly becomes palatable. The lady “leant forward and smiled, and her hair moved with her, as if it were not just hair but a hat made of hair,” a feature not uncommon among women politicians at the time. But, “She turned her head in my direction; she opened her lips to speak, and shards of glass fell out.” No need to mention the Secretary’s name.
Carmel’s reaction to a southerner’s comment is waspish. “I wasn’t used to Londoners then. I’m still not. They talk so much. I always want to smash their jaws shut; I realize the reaction may be excessive.”
Mantel’s literary skill, which was manifested so magnificently in her Wolf Hall trilogy, is in evidence here, fully formed.
Pedant’s corner:- “thorn in Jesus’ crown” (Jesus’s,) “was now sewed with a name-tape” (was now sewn,) sunk (x 2, sank,) swum (swam.)
