Let me start off by saying I am a huge fan of Tudor England. I am also a fan of reading, particularly historical fiction. My favorite subject would be, of course, Anne Boleyn, the Boleyn family, and her friends. I heard that The Other Boleyn Girl was chronicling Mary Boleyn, the relatively unknown sister of Anne, and I was undoubtedly excited. I've always thought of Mary as the less succesful sister, the foolish one, who enjoyed the bodily pleasures and failed in her ambitions(there being overwhelming evidence to support this), as opposed to the witty, intelligent, wordly and ambitious Anne who was spirtually adept and not neccisarily a physical being. I, of course have read books where Anne was not all of these and still enjoyed them so don't think my intense admiration for Anne is coloring my review.
Let me start off with the basics; Characterization. Gregory apparently skipped this class-or at least was asleep for the majority of it. All of her characters are two-deminsional-at best. Let's start with the protagonist-Mary. For no reason whatsoever Mary has grown up superior to her family...despite the fact that she had no outside influence to change this. She never mentions a mentor who taught her her values and moral superiority,she is not particularly religious,she merely is better-something that goes intensly against human nature. Mary's intentions are soley good all the time, she just wants to be with her beautiful children and escape her evil family. I suppose her good nature was supposed to leave me on pins and needles just hoping she gets that beautiful happily ever after-in fact, it had the exact opposite effect. I found Mary's troubles superficial in comparision to those around her, the majority of whom where sincerely better people with causes they were dedicated to. Mary was simply self involved to the point of making me nauseous. When her sister gives birth to a girl who is apparently-and innacuratly- unloved whom is apparently her sisters downfall(again, innacurately)-and what is Mary's thought process? She is not concerned for her sister who is now treading down the road to execution, not for the King she once loved who is bitterly dissapointed in the woman he love not being what he expected, and not even for the poor baby girl-but for herself. She tells her husband that she can't believe she's going to have to wait for another pregnancy to "escape". When Jane Seymour is slowly taking Anne's place as Queen at court, and Anne is understandbly saying how much she wishes she was dead, Mary returns with a "Anne that is so horrible". What? What is Anne supposed to feel? Jane certainly wanted Anne dead. No one around her is good enough for Mary, and her morality seemed to grate on my nerves. At one point she threatens suicide to her sister-and I was half hoping she would actually go through with it to end this narcissisticly schreeching, whiny narration.
Anne, I am supposed to gather, was the exact opposite of her wonderful sister. This wonderful, intelligent, witty and albiet ambitious woman is reduced to a pure evil caraciture. There are no limits to her evil, everything about her is cruel, she doesn't hesitate in way before committing the most henious acts, with none of the basic human emotion of regret. Turn to any given page and there is an example of her evilness. There is not one nice thing said about Anne in this book. Even on the eve of her execution she doesn't seem to want to repent anything. Why would Henry literally turn church and state on its head for this woman, one might ask? Good question, and I'm still trying to figure it out. Anne had many, many, many admirers because she was a very attractive, intelligent and generally pleasing being. She may have had moments of cruelty, though so has everyone, but that does not mean they are a one-deminsional harpy with little thought above how she can advance herself. Even though Gregory, I'm gathering, wanted me to hate her, I really only loved her simply becuase she was different than that whiny protagonist.
The other characters are equally unbelievable. Thomas and Elizabeth Boleyn were certainly ambitious, but I doubt they were this careless when it came to their children. Ambition does not equal recklessly evil, though I got the feeling that this is what the moral of this story was supposed to be. Henry had no depth whatsoever, and was constantly WHINING! He was King of England, he really need not whine so much. William Stafford is supposed to be the ideal, supportive man who is deeply commited to Mary-for God knows why- and he is basically a characticature. George Boleyn is either doing two things-hanging around his sister's bedchamber or cavorting with his male lover. Katherine of Aragon was-historically speaking-certainly a wronged woman, but I have trouble believing she was so unhumanly saintly. This really isn't the only book that does this-authors who are sympathetic to Katherine tend to make her out-of-this-world Godly. Katherine was a human being, with flaws just like the rest of us-I'd love to see some of them sometime.
Now the laundry list of historical errors:
Mary Boleyn spent many years at the French Court, where she had quite the reputation of being permiscuous(the King of France called her "my English mare" becuase he "rides her so often"), and sent home in disgrace because of it. She was probably the older sister(and five or so years older than this), but if she was not, Anne would probably be three or four years older, becuase Mary would hardly be sleeping around at 11. Mary was Henry's mistress for perhaps two years, and her children were not his. Anne and Henry Percy did not connsummate their engagement-it would have been impossible to break. The Boleyn "family meetings" probably did not happen-Anne and Mary probably both made their way to the King's bed on their own, seeing as how Mary had done it before and Anne staunchly resisted his advances for a year before becoming emotionally-though not physically-involved. Mary probably didn't even consider Katherine of Aragon's feelings-mistresses in Kings were considered common, and if a King did not have one he was considered weak. Mary was hardly cast aside with nothing, she was given all the favors of a royal mistress. Anne's cruelty to Mary Tudor and Katherine has been overexaggerated for hundreds of years-she was indifferent at worst to them both. Fisher and More were executed in that order, how could that not get past an editor? Anne loved Elizabeth fiercly and intensly, and did not neglect her in the wet nurses' chamber, but insisted on breast feeding. Anne's miscarraige of a deformed baby and George's homosexuality were taken directly from Retha Warnicke's biography, which is perfectly fine, but Warnicke's main theory is the discounting of Chapuys as an accurate source, who has been the major source to prove to people that she was evil. She uses undeniable evidence to prove this, and yet Gregory did clearly did not use this, so she either only read the parts that sounded cool to her, or simply skimmed the back. Mary Boleyn was banished from court and then begged for years to be allowed back, she did not make a stealthy escape, and she never comes back, not even when her siblings are rotting in the Tower. Anne was a surpisingly liberal Queen,and saved hundreds upon hundreds from the Inquosition, something Gregory conviently forgets-she also donated thousands of pounds to charity-which is equivalant to millions nowadays. Not one heretic was burned while Anne was Queen, although hunreds were burned before and hundreds after. Anne saved both Catholics and Protestants from the burning post. And for GOD'S SAKE; Anne did not commit incest!!!! She swore "upon the damnation of mine own mortal soul" that she did not, evenwhen she didn't neccisarily have to. No one seriously believes Anne commited adultery, or was a witch, and absolutely no one believes she had sex with her brother. Why does Gregory feel the need to include this? I'm willing to bet the vast majority were hating Anne at this point anyways, so including charges she was certianly innocent of was just plain disrepectful. And there were so many, many more.
After reading all of this, I was naturally inflamed, but after reading the interview in the back I was half ready to hunt Gregory down and accuse her of incest with her brother. She says things like "historians are divided as to whether the charges actually took place" Um...no they are not. I think Gregory is the first person to insist that they could be true in a hundred years. "Anne was not a woman who let morals get in her way" This is a strange sentence, and also patenly false. All of the sources listed in Gregory's "bibliography" have varying degrees of respect for Anne, and Alison Weir clearly does not like her, but even the ones who do not think she was a Godly creature insist that she did have morals and virtues. Gregory also insists "Anne was clearly guilty of one murder" What?! I have no idea what she is talking about here, genuinely no idea. She insists that there is evidence that she tried to poison Fisher. This evidence is a rumour that started contemporarily, in which Anne sent a messanger to him to tell him to avoid Parliment should he become sick. This is a rumor, and Weir is perhaps the only historian who believes it. Gregory says the broad facts of Mary's life are true in the novel-of which they are not. She discounts every other type of fiction and constantly toots her own horn. She says it's perfectly reasonable that Anne would have commited incest with her brother to getting pregnant and that George would be the "obvious choice". It's an odd world when your brother is the obvious choice for getting pregnant.
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