The first time I read Mantel it was because of my husband’s grandmother. She lives in Glossop, a town on the edge of the peak district, which is the end of the line, but not quite, as the train has to head backwards out of the station to do a shimmy up to Hadfield, which really is the end of the line. I then learned two facts about Hadfield: the League of Gentlemen was filmed there, and that writer, Hilary Mantel, grew up there. She wasn’t famous then the way she is now, just famous for Hadfield, which was famous enough. So when I saw a slim volume called Fludd for sale in a second hand shop I bought it, when otherwise I might have left it behind.

Fludd was an odd place to start with Mantel, but in many ways perfect. It’s a book about catholicism, and faith, and small places, and escape. It’s also a classic ‘stranger comes to town’ story, where the arrival of a mysterious stranger upsets and recalibrates the lives of the people he meets. Is he real? Is he supernatural? It’s never made clear. It’s a short book, and contains most of what you’d need to know about the character of Mantel as a writer: she writes consistently with attention, candour, humour and kindness. Which isn’t to say that she gives her characters an easy ride, just that she manages to expose them in as nice a way as possible.

Over the years since I’ve read more of her work, and been to see her read from her books and talk about them many times, and always come away wishing she was my aunt. I’d phone her when I felt miserable or uncertain, and she would rattle away to me, dispensing some sharp advice among the kind words of encouragement, and I would put the phone down feeling bolstered, and properly myself again, and that I have to prove something to Aunt Hilary, which would drive me to my desk and the neglected pen.

Or there would be an annual pilgrimage to see her, taking vintage port, and some ink from her favourite shop, and she would be as pleased to see me as she is pleased to see the back of me when the visit is finished, but in between we’d have eaten dinner, and talked of consequential things, and of handbags and scarves too. I would feel as if I had grown cleverer just by sitting next to her, and become less frightened of being clever, and having my own thoughts.

And there might be the odd postcard coming through my letterbox, with recommendations for a new exhibitions or lipgloss, or a suggestion of books to buy, or indeed the books themselves might plonk onto the mat, and they would always make me smile, and send me to my desk.

Because whenever you go to see Mantel speak, you realise that she’s pulling off that most amazing of feats: a woman, in public, being intelligent, and yet warm and funny, without simultaneously making her audience feel patronised or lost. She draws you in, in the same way she does in her work, just by being bloody interesting, clever and not ashamed of it. And it makes me, as a woman, who also writes, want to be better and more than I am expected to be, which is why the fabricated hoohah surrounding her speech on royal women is so depressing. So much was reflexively condemned by so many voices before anyone put their hand up and said, “hang on – are you sure that’s what she said?” It relied on the playground argument that ‘she might be clever, but she still wishes she was beautiful, the bitter jealous cow’, which clever girls are subjected to at school from a very young age. Too big for her boots too, as they might have said up in Hadfield.

We all thought we were past that, didn’t we?

Well I did, naively.

And since I can’t bear to live with the idea that I ought to stop having thoughts and writing them down, I’m going to carry on thinking that we’re past that. In my mind I’m going to call Aunt Hilary and listen to her dismiss the fools, and then turn the tables and ask me, ‘well, what have you written today?’, and since I can’t bear to disappoint her I’m going to knuckle down and get on with it.

I was one of those kids – “oh I always had my nose in a book” “all I wanted to do was read” “I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a child”. But I once had a brief period where I fell out of love with literature and reading, and it was entirely down to the English department at my university. Don’t ask me which one, because I think it would have happened regardless of which university I’d gone to.

Right up to A level, studying English Literature had allowed a little love in the classroom. I had some of those almost mythical brilliant teachers, in love with words, writing, and passing that love on. They gave me their enthusiasms for Shakespeare, Orwell and Austen, and introduced us to the pleasure of crafting our own stories. As the obvious wordgeek in the class my teachers encouraged my story writing, gave me books, and loaned me video adaptations of Pride and Prejudice while trying not to swoon about the bit where Darcy appears from behind a bush*. True story. Suddenly at university we were suddenly reading a ‘text’ a week (oh how I loathed the term ‘text’) and dissecting, rebuilding, inspecting. It was discussed and pushed aside.

What happened to enjoying the damn book? I wondered.

And so I jumped ship, because I really wasn’t enjoying it, and my university had a clever system that allowed you to do this sort of thing. I jumped sideways, and got a degree in Philosophy instead, which I’d taken as a required minor simply because it was in the same building, one corridor down. Not exactly a true story, but not so far from it.

I didn’t read much in the final years of my degree. I’d lost the love. (I know!) I still hung around second hand bookshops, but you have to feel settled in a place to consider bulking it out with books. Instead I got drunk, and danced a lot, and watched a lot of good films. When my degree spat me out of the other side, capable of rational thought but qualified for little else (though I defy anyone who says that learning to think isn’t a worthwhile pursuit), I panicked. I spent the summer in a flat in my university town, unwilling to acknowledge that it was over and I was going to have to find a job.

One day I went to the discount bookshop and found that Wordsworth editions had published the entirety of the Sherlock Holmes canon, in several books, for a pound each. I bought them all, went back to my flat and spent the next two months lying about listening to the Glen Miller Band and reading Holmes.

My god, but I was happy.

Here he was, perfect in his imperfections, so very flawed, but the only man worth talking to in the whole of London. I couldn’t wait to get to the next story, turn the page, and discover how he’d solve the mystery. I gasped at Reichenbach, though I obviously had another volume to read, so he clearly wasn’t dead. I wished I could go to Baker Street, I wished I could time travel, I wished I was brilliant, I wished we had our own Sherlock, and the promise that there could be someone out there who could see through all the mess and sort it out. I was in love, with Holmes and with reading again.

When summer ended, I went back home for a while. I joined the library. I stayed up late reading all kinds of books again, read the Lord of the Rings and fell in love with that, at the same time thinking ‘wow, this is badly written’. I read. I read and read and read. And I realised I couldn’t stay in the place I’d grown up in.

I packed up my books and moved south, and soon found I had a job in a bookshop, which is where so many aspiring writers end up. It was down Cecil Court, not far from the Charing Cross Road, and sold first editions mostly, but it was also known for specialising in two things: P G Wodehouse and Sherlock Holmes. Without that bookshop nothing over the last fifteen years would have happened.

So Conan-Doyle saved my life twice. Thanks, Arthur.

*this was as good as it got pre Firth. It was actually pretty good. (P&P 1980)