Starting with her début, the creepily effective black comedy “Every Day Is Mother’s Day,” about a put-upon young social worker faced with a disturbing case, it has been clear that Mantel is interested in the past. But the histories she explored tended to be the unhappy pasts that individuals and families so often try to suppress, usually unsuccessfully and sometimes with disastrous results. Unlike many in the boys’ club of popular British authors, from Martin Amis to Kazuo Ishiguro, the younger Mantel, who until “Wolf Hall” was something of an outsider in the British literary establishment, chose to focus on a seamy, often ugly underside of English life: the grubby provinces, the crazy charwomen and delusional mediums, people and places with pasts worth fleeing. “But you have to put the past behind you, don’t you?” a character asks rhetorically in “Vacant Possession,” the sequel to “Every Day Is Mother’s Day.” “If it will let you,” comes the response. In Mantel, it usually doesn’t.

“A Change of Climate” wrenchingly dramatizes this theme. Set in the nineteen-eighties, it unfolds the story of a British couple, Anna and Ralph Eldred, who were the victims of a horrific act of violence when they were newlyweds working for a missionary society in southern Africa, in the fifties—a crime triggered when Anna carelessly offends an employee. (Mantel enjoys contrasting our desire to do good with the limits of our ability to comprehend the “others” whom we want to help.) Now back in England, the Eldreds never mention what happened, but the apparently normal and useful lives they lead—Ralph runs a family charity—are riven by fissures through which their past suffering rises to the surface, like a poisonous vapor, threatening to destroy the equilibrium they thought they’d achieved.

As for inauthenticity and inaccuracies, the misrepresentations that Mantel likes to expose aren’t of the anachronistic-chimney-stack kind. What interests her are the half-truths, evasions, and self-delusions that people cling to, often at great cost, in order to get through their (usually grim) lives. In “Every Day Is Mother’s Day,” the social worker comes to see how her colleagues have chosen to delude themselves about the nature of the suffering and evil that they witness. At the center of these books stands an unsettlingly opaque figure, a mentally disturbed young woman named Muriel. At once malevolent and victimized, she represents another favorite theme of Mantel’s: the presence in life of an irreducible core of pain and unreason that resists any genial assumptions about the coherence or redeemability of the world. “I thought there was order in the world, at least—a kind of progress, a meaning, a pattern,” Ralph Eldred reflects in “A Change of Climate,” speaking for many of the author’s characters. “But where is the pattern now?”

Small wonder that Mantel has returned so often to the supernatural— ghosts, in particular. In many of her novels, the border between reality and unreality, sanity and madness, is as fuzzy as the one between past and present, truth and lies. (Muriel’s mother abuses her because she thinks she’s saving the girl from evil spirits that inhabit their house.) Sometimes this shadow world of lurking evil turns out to be explicable. In “Eight Months on Ghazzah Street” (1988), Frances, an Englishwoman who has accompanied her engineer husband to Saudi Arabia, finds herself a virtual prisoner in their apartment complex, where whispered comings and goings on the stairs and in the hallways provoke a growing paranoia in her, a “feeling that something is going on, just outside her range of vision.” Her conviction that she has detected a criminal cabal operating out of the apartment upstairs is questioned by everyone around her until the truth explodes, with devastating results. Frances is one of a number of Mantel’s female characters who must struggle to make themselves believed.

In other works, the border between natural and supernatural collapses under the pressure of unreason and suffering. In what may be Mantel’s masterpiece, “Beyond Black” (2005), a creamily luscious prose stands in disconcerting contrast to the bizarrenesses and horrors it narrates. Its protagonist is Alison, a morbidly obese medium who has to contend with some very real spirits, in particular a band of thugs led by a ghoul called Morris, who likes to lounge around her room playing with his fly. The irrepressible dead torment her as mercilessly now as they did when they were alive: when Alison was a child, we learn, they raped and tortured her. Mantel’s ghosts embody the histories that we can’t bury.

In an interview, Mantel referred with startling matter-of-factness to the presence of ghosts in her own life: “When I was a child I believed our house was haunted, and so—worryingly—did the grown-ups.” In a 2003 memoir called, unsurprisingly, “Giving Up the Ghost,” she writes of how, when she was seven, she witnessed something uncanny in the yard behind the family home: a ripple in the fabric of the afternoon, a disturbance in the atmosphere that, to her mind, had to do with “the nature of evil.” The recurrent figure of the ghost in Mantel’s works bridges two paramount themes: the lingering presence of the pasts we would forget, and the opacity of the evils, impervious to sense and impossible to “pattern,” that we suffer in the present. The darkness of her themes and the rebarbative strangeness of the narratives in which she clothed them may not have won her international fandom, but they bespeak a genuine and bracing originality.

Astonished helplessness in the presence of unreason and cruelty was what brought Mantel to the genre with which she is most closely identified today. In “Giving Up the Ghost,” she details the sufferings inflicted on her not only by the ignorant and vindictive nuns who taught her as a child, but also, later in life, by a long line of doctors who failed to take seriously a devastating chronic illness. Starting in her early adolescence, Mantel displayed symptoms of what turned out to be a severe case of endometriosis, a condition in which cells that normally appear inside the uterus grow outside it, causing crippling pain. Her symptoms were dismissed initially as psychosomatic or signs of a psychiatric illness. (Treated with antipsychotic drugs, she later experienced psychotic episodes.) It wasn’t until she was in her twenties, when she did her own research and diagnosed the problem, that proper treatment began.

At university, Mantel studied law, and in her memoir she writes of having developed an interest in the question of where “the powers of the state begin and end.” During her illness, she read extensively about the French Revolution and found in that history an external correlative to experiences she understood all too well from her time in school and in the clinics. “I began to read about the old regime, its casual cruelties, its heartless style,” she writes. “I thought, but I know this stuff. By nature, I knew about despotism: the unratified decisions, handed down from the top, arbitrarily enforced: the face of strength when it moves in on the weak.”

From that epiphany resulted the first novel that Mantel wrote, in 1979. (It wasn’t published until 1992.) “A Place of Greater Safety” is a work of historical fiction that entwines the lives of three leaders of the Revolution—Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre—from their childhoods until their early deaths at the hands of the movement they created. Mantel has recalled of her research, “I had pressed the juice of meaning from every scrap of paper . . . every note on every source,” but the book’s more than seven hundred pages suggest that she hadn’t yet figured out how to balance “history” and “fiction.” Among other things, her characters too often do what characters in historical fiction are, mortifyingly, forced to do, which is to emblematize or give voice to entire currents in history or thought. (“Free thought, free speech—is that too much to ask?”)