Tabloid slams novelist Mantel over Kate comments

The Daily Mail on Tuesday ran a front-page broadside against two-time Booker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel for what it called her “venomous attack” on the former Kate Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge.

Within hours, the Internet was ablaze. Prime Minister David Cameron joined in the criticism of Mantel while others rushed to her defense.

In a speech earlier this month, the writer had characterized the 31-year-old wife of Prince William as “a jointed doll on which certain rags were hung ... a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own.”

Mantel said that Kate, as a royal consort, “appeared to have been designed by committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished.”

Mantel's speech, reprinted this week in the London Review of Books, was about the British public's complex relationship with royalty over the centuries — a relationship both symbiotic and voyeuristic.

The speech looked at the way the public and the press both glorify and destroy royals, from Anne Boleyn to Princess Diana, casting them in roles and stories in which “adulation can swing to persecution, within hours.”

But for the Daily Mail, this became “an astonishing and venomous attack on the Duchess of Cambridge.”

The newspaper's front page juxtaposed pictures of the author and the duchess alongside the front-page headline: “A plastic princess designed to breed.”

It quoted Mantel's speech at length, although it did not note that the 60-year-old author was describing what she saw as a view of Kate constructed by the press and public opinion.

Online reaction was divided, with some defending Mantel's words as provocative and thoughtful and others calling them hurtful.

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