Author battered by royal backlash

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge visits Hope House, an Action on Addiction women's treatment centre. Source: Getty Images

• Kate shows off her bump at charity event
• Novelist Hilary Mantel slams Kate as 'plastic'
• Sister Pippa Middleton 'happy with new boyfriend'

CATHERINE, Duchess of Cambridge, has willingly shown off her baby bump for the first time as she did charity work at a women's addiction centre.

It follows the publication of unauthorised pictures of the duchess in a bikini, showing her bump, which is said to have angered the royal family.

This time though Catherine was elegantly dressed in a grey wrap, above-the-knee dress by Max Mara Studio, complete with a ruched waist and attached waist tie.

Hope House, in the southwest suburb of Clapham, was one of the first charities that the duchess became a patron of. It is designed as a safe place for women to recover from substance dependence and receive additional support for other compulsive disorders.

Her visit came as British novelist Hilary Mantel faced criticism for describing Catherine as a "shop window mannequin" with a "plastic smile" whose only purpose is to breed.

The double Booker Brize winning author, 60, said the duchess had neither the personality of William's mother Diana nor the presence of historical heavyweight Anne Boleyn, who features heavily in Mantel's novel Wolf Hall.

In a lecture given two weeks ago at the British Museum and reprinted this week in the London Review of Books literary journal, Mantel said the Duchess of Cambridge appeared "machine-made" when she first emerged in public.

Catherine has been slammed by British novelist Hilary Mantel as a "shop window mannequin" with a "plastic smile" whose only purpose is to breed.

"Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished," Mantel said.

Mantel said 31-year-old Catherine had gone from being a "jointed doll on which certain rags are hung" to someone whose "only point and purpose" was to have children, according to the novelist.

Before marrying second-in-line to the throne William in 2011 and falling pregnant last year, Kate was a "shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore."

"These days she is a mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions. Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant," she said.

The novelist compared Kate unfavourably to Boleyn, the "power player" who married 16th-century English king Henry VIII before he had her beheaded, and to Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris in 1997.

"She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture."

Kate shows off the latest in maternity fashion.

Mantel is the only woman to win the Man Booker Price twice, claiming the first in 2009 for Wolf Hall, the opening part of her trilogy about Henry VIII's adviser Thomas Cromwell.

The second instalment, Bring Up The Bodies, won the award last year.

A spokeswoman for William and Catherine declined to comment when contacted.

Britain's Daily Mail newspaper described Mantel's comments as an "astonishing and venomous attack on the Duchess of Cambridge."

Joe Little, the editor of Majesty Magazine, was quoted as saying by The (London) Daily Telegraph newspaper that Mantel's comments were "incredibly unkind."

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge shows off her baby bump.

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