Readers who came to Hilary Mantel after her double-Booker-winning success with Wolf Hall made her a star of the literary world may not be aware that she grew up in a working-class home in a Derbyshire mill town. She, however, said many times that that background had a decisive influence on her as a person and a writer, and in Giving Up the Ghost she shows how. In the end, her status as a working-class woman almost leads to her death. Her memoir prompts the question, how much things changed – or not?