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45 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The rise and fall of a royal mistress, March 25, 2006
History has continued to be a very fertile field for novelists. After all, the characters and most of the actions are already there, ready to be molded and tweaked into shape by the author, and if it's done well enough, then the few liberties that are taken sometimes can be forgiven. But if an author plays a bit too far with what happens in history -- or rather as we can percieve history to be -- then the story is turned into a laughable mess.
One of the few authors that I've read who has taken on Tudor England, and make it work, has been Karen Harper. Her first novel, Passion's Reign, has been reissued in large trade paperback format and retitled The Last Boleyn.
The novel opens with an eight-year-old Mary Bullen overhearing her parents discussing her future. Unlike her elder brother, George, and her younger sister, Anne, Mary has inherited the fabulous looks of her mother's highborn family, the Howards. She is blonde, blue eyed and very pretty, just the sort of beauty that is coveted. Her father, a fast rising courtier in Henry VIII's court, has been named as an ambassador to the Netherlands, and he intends to bring Mary with him to acquire social graces and an education, while her mother is heartbroken to be losing her elder daughter. Little does Mary realize what this new twist in her life is going to bring to her.
We follow Mary's life from an innocent child, to when she is made a part of Henry VIII's sister Mary Tudor, as she briefly married to the French King. Mary is at first enchanted with the French court, sophisticated and gay, but as she grows up, we also see her falling under the spell of the new king, Francois I, with his seductive, wiley ways. Mary all too quickly finds herself a pawn in the polictical and sexual games, and gains a hard education in the realities of royalty. Even when her younger sister Anne joins her in France, it isn't enough to help allieve the distrust that Mary has learned to face the world with.
When she returns to England as a teenager, she also moves into the circle around Henry VIII, and meets the two men that will change her life. Will Carey, a courtier from an old but faded family, is the one that she marries, but he's cold and distant to her, more interested in possessing her than loving her, and regaining his ancestral estates. And then there is Will Stafford -- Staff, as he is refered to in the novel -- a charming, cynical courtier who always seems to be there when Mary needs a steady shoulder. But will her broken heart, crushed by two kings and an indifferent husband, be able to accept this man?
It's an interesting story, made all the more enjoyable by the fact that it all really happened, from the questions about Mary's son by Will Carey to her second marriage. Anne Bullen -- the name has several variations -- is here a woman caught up in a dangerous game, and instead of being a shrewish b!tch, is instead a nervous, high-strung woman whose inability to moderate herself is what brings her down in the end. Henry VIII is also seen in a more favorable light, as a king who views the world as something to manipulate, and determined to have exactly what he wants. While the novel is very much a product of the early eighties style of romance novel, where men are a bit more brutal than what we would accept now, and women just as tough as the men, it's still a decent read after nearly twenty five reads. Few novels have that sort of legs to stand on.
Inevitably, there are going to be comparisons with Philippa Gregory's novel, The Other Boleyn Girl, which is also told from the point of view of Mary Boleyn. But unlike Gregory's novel, Harper stays firmly within in the known facts of Mary Boleyn's life. Yes, Mary did has had little attention from historians in favour of her more famous sister, but in the end, this novel shows her in a very human, far wiser role than usual. Mary knew when to cut her losses, unlike Anne, and have been far more realistic in her attitudes, and grows up considerably in maturity and wisdom as the book progresses. In a curious twist, Gregory has a future novel that is to be released also called The Last Boleyn, that looks at Jane Rochford, the unfortunate and rather sad wife of George Boleyn, sometime in the future.
Ms. Harper now writes historical mysteries, focused around Queen Elizabeth I as a slueth, but this first novel has been one of my favorites over the years, and I'm glad to see it come back into print. Several extra features have been added to the original text, including a new afterword by the author, and a reader's guide that has some fairly good questions for those that want to delve deeper into the nuances of the story. Recommended. This review appears in slightly different form on Epinions.com by this author.
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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Worth reading, if only for comparison, May 11, 2006
(both with other books about the era and with Karen Harper's later work)
Anyone who needs a dose of humility regarding just how little we know about history should read this book (originally published in 1983 as _Passion's Reign_) in conjunction with Philippa Gregory's _The Other Boleyn Girl_. Although the portrayal of Anne Boleyn's sister Mary as well as the basic plot outline, following history, is similar in the two books, the details, interpretations of relationships and behavior, and many other things are completely different. Some of this is due to advances in historical research. For example, it was originally accepted that Mary was the elder sister; now Anne is generally believed to be, but the fact is that as members of the relatively minor gentry the years of their births were considered to be to unimportant to be recorded at the time. Much of the difference, however, is just due to different emphases and the interpretations of the individual authors. What was Mary's relationship with William Carey (her first husband) like? Did she marry him when barely into her teens or after she already had caught King Henry VIII's eye? Was he or the king the father of her children? When did she meet her second husband? The records are not always clear, and this leaves a lot of room for authorial creativity.
In the highly-regarded Elizabeth I mysteries, I have generally found Harper's historical research to be impeccable, but it is quite a bit more shaky here. For example, numerous references are made to the Duchess of Suffolk's daughter "Margaret," when a glance at any basic genealogy would have shown that there was no such person. Either Harper is referring to the daughter and namesake of Henry's other sister or to one of the Duchess' daughters, whose names were Frances and Eleanor. Things such as this may be minor, but they can be annoying, especially when repeated several times. The Duchess of Suffolk, the famous "Tudor Rose" who is well known to have shared Henry's coloring, is also referred to as having "raven" hair.
On the whole, however, I found this novel to be fairly well-written, and it kept me reading, even though I knew the basic storyline. The historical Mary Boleyn is an incredibly sympathetic character, and as a pawn of her father and husband in their paths to the king's favor, it is easy to feel sorry for her, but as she seems to have done in real life, she eventually finds the courage to stand up for herself and her right to happiness. Harper's portrayal of Anne is much more sympathetic than Gregory's, although I still don't get enough of a sense of her first "great love," the thwarting of which is supposed to drive much of her later career. (I also have to say that I cannot imagine Anne Boleyn giggling, as she does at least twice in this book!) Mary's parents and her second husband William Stafford are also clearly and convincingly drawn, although "Staff," as he is known throughout, is a bit too much the clich?d "masterful lover" of the romances for my taste. The well-known figures of the era such as Henry himself are not so vividly portrayed, nor are the machinations of court life, although an intriguing and slightly (but not entirely) sinister cameo of his minister Thomas Cromwell is provided. In addition, there are many other masterful touches, even though this must have been one of Harper's earliest novels.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Story , March 10, 2006
This was a very good fictional account of the life of Mary Boleyn. You always read about Anne and George, but little about Mary. The book tells the story of how it was really Mary who set in to motion the families rise to power and how she managed to escape their subsequent fall. I enjoyed the book very much and recommend it to all historical fiction fans.
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