The Other Boleyn Girl: Difference between revisions

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "The Other Boleyn Girl" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please help improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (February 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The Other Boleyn Girl

Author	Philippa Gregory
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Scribner
Publication date	2001
Publication place	England
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	0739427113 (hardcover edition) Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character

For the 2007 film based on the novel, see The Other Boleyn Girl (film)

The Other Boleyn Girl is a historical novel written by British author Philippa Gregory, based on the life of 16th-century aristocrat Mary Boleyn. Reviews were mixed; some said it was a brilliantly claustrophobic look at the palace life in Tudor England, while others weren't convinced. Even so, it has enjoyed phenomenal success and popularity since its publication in 2002 and has spawned four sequels - The Queen's Fool, The Virgin's Lover, The Constant Princess and The Boleyn Inheritance.

The story opens in 1521 when Mary's distant cousin, the Duke of Buckingham, is executed on the king's orders. His crime was daring to suggest that Henry could not produce a healthy son. A year later, Mary's older sister, Anne, returns from the French Court where she has lived as a lady-in-waiting for the last few years. Both the Boleyn girls are remarkable beauties, and Mary (despite being only thirteen years old) is already married to the wealthy courtier, Sir William Carey. Mary's life is turned upside down, however, when the 31-year-old King Henry VIII takes an interest in her. Despite being a favourite lady-in-waiting to his wife, Queen Katherine, Mary yields to her family's pressure and reluctantly becomes the king's mistress. She is assisted in this process by her two siblings - the quick-witted George and the scheming Anne. To her father's delight, Mary becomes pregnant with the king's child. She gives birth to two children - Catherine and Henry. However, while she is pregnant, Anne sets out to seduce the king and steal him away from her sister. She is successful, and the King flirts with Anne by day and sleeps with Mary by night. In the process he breaks Mary's heart, who has by now fallen in love with him.

By 1527, Henry has made up his mind to divorce his wife and marry Anne. Mary is pushed into the background and becomes the other Boleyn girl. She is reduced to being Anne's lady-in-waiting. As an act of malice, Anne secretly adopts Mary's son, stealing all legal rights as the child's mother. She becomes consumed by her ambition to be queen, not even bothering to sympathise when Mary's husband dies of the sweating sickness in 1528. Mary comes to suspect that Anne is planning to poison Katherine, and has already attempted to poison a bishop who is opposed to the Boleyns' ambitions.

In 1532 Mary falls in love with a handsome servant, William Stafford, whom she secretly marries. A year later, Anne becomes queen. When she discovers Mary has married a commoner and is pregnant with his child, she immediately banishes her from court. Meanwhile, Mary's brother George is trapped in a miserable marriage to Jane Parker and is seeking solace in a secret homosexual affair with Sir Francis Weston. After Anne gives birth to a daughter, Elizabeth in 1533, she suffers two miscarriages - being forced to abort one with a witches' potion. When Mary returns to court in 1535, she begins to suspect that the King is impotent and that Anne and George have committed an incestuous affair in order to help her conceive again. Her fears are seemingly confirmed when Anne has another miscarriage in 1536, and the fetus is monstrously deformed.

The novel now hurtles towards its conclusion. Anne is arrested in May, and so is George. He and his homosexual lover are executed as Anne's supposed lovers, Mary is uncertain what to think - knowing that people are telling lies about her sister, but also fearing that they are telling the truth. In an echo of the novel's beginning chapter, The Other Boleyn Girl ends with an execution - Anne's.

Mary lives out the rest of her life in peace, with her common-born husband, William Stafford.

Mary Boleyn was the sister of the more famous Anne Boleyn. As such, she is usually mentioned in the numerous biographies that have been written about Anne, but never in any substantial detail.

Mary, unlike Anne, was the mistress of two kings - François I of France and England's Henry VIII. She was born sometime between 1499 and 1508, probably around 1500. She was considered the more attractive of the two, and was the one member of the Boleyn family who ultimately was able to avoid the controversies that led to the executions of both her sister Anne and her brother George.

She was married twice, and died in 1543. Philippa Gregory was intrigued by the story of a queen's sister who apparently has been forgotten by history, but seemed to have been the more interesting of the two sisters. Some of the novel's storyline was loosely based on the work of American historian, Retha M. Warnicke, and the books of British historian, Alison Weir. Others, however, were clear dramatic devices. As a novelist, Gregory also often altered or ignored actual historic events to portray Mary Boleyn in a more positive light, particularly through her portrayal of Mary as a heroine, determined to achieve independence unheard of for an upper-class woman in the mid-sixteenth century.

Gregory has a high rate of success with using relatively unknown characters in her historical novels - often, they are not typical historical heroines. In The Queen's Fool, she used the character of Mary I in a sympathetic light, whilst she is usually demonised by admirers of Elizabeth I. The Other Boleyn Girl was unusual not only because it centered on the relatively unknown life of Mary Boleyn; but also because of the sources Gregory listed in her author's note. Some queried if she had overstepped the appropriate limits of a historical novelist and had invited criticism precisely because she listed the sources she had consulted, thus allegedly implying that the novel's storyline was more historically accurate than its critics suggested. Her defenders argue that irrespective of the sources used, Gregory has an artistic license as an author of fiction to construct whatever story she feels is appropriate.

Internationally renowned novel critic Dr. James Higgins (who has a PhD in Historic Literature from the University of Australia) said of Gregory when he reviewed The Other Boleyn Girl:

"Philippa Gregory has created a mesmerising work of fiction, seamlessly intertwined with historical fact. While her list of sources may give some reason to believe her novel contains more fact than fiction, it is quite clear to me that Gregory has gained a knowledge of the basic storyline, as well the culture and customs of the Tudor Court, and embellished and dramatised it even more (if that is possible). She hints that she does indeed believe that Anne Boleyn was innocent, but changed her story in order to create a more shocking and scandalous situation. At the end of The Other Boleyn Girl one cannot help but feel sorry for Anne Boleyn, and one gets the feeling that Gregory feels the same way, as she attests to in a later book (The Boleyn Inheritance)."

Despite the criticism (see below), the novel has enjoyed high commercial success and it has a large and loyal fan-base. It has appealed to popular interest in the Tudor era, which is currently high in both Britain and America. It has been followed by a sequel called The Queen's Fool, set during the reigns of Henry's daughters, Queen Mary and Elizabeth. The Queen's Fool was followed by The Virgin's Lover, set during the early days of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Less successful than The Other Boleyn Girl, The Virgin's Lover once again showed Gregory's refusal to shy away from historical controversy by suggesting Elizabeth ordered the assassination of Mary of Guise and Amy Robsart, the wife of Robert Dudley.

Gregory is also the author of The Constant Princess, a romanticised story of Anne's predecessor, Catherine of Aragon and The Boleyn Inheritance, the tale of Catherine Howard's rise to the throne in 1540.

Some of the inaccuracies in question include the following:

• There is no evidence that George Boleyn was homosexual; he was in fact, according to Eric Ives, known as a womanizer. The theory that those executed along with Anne were homosexuals comes from Retha Warnicke's (mostly discredited) theses.
• Mary was almost certainly the elder sister, and the eldest of the Boleyn children.
• It has long been rumored that one or both of Mary Boleyn's children were fathered by Henry. Some writers, e.g. Alison Weir, question whether Henry Carey (Mary's son) was fathered by the King.^[1] While others such as, Dr. G.W. Bernard (author of The King's Reformation) and Joanna Denny (author of Anne Boleyn: A New Life of England's Tragic Queen and Katherine Howard: A Tudor Conspiracy) argue that he may have been.
• Mary's parents did not encourage her sexual escapades, and were horrified when she was sent home from France in disgrace.
• Anne Boleyn did not adopt Mary's son; rather, she took him on as her ward after the death of his father, and supplied him with an education, a kind act. In this book, it was turned into an act of vengeance.

There were also general inaccuracies over dates, but this is usual in historical fiction. Mary Boleyn was considered to be fairly promiscuous, and had been sexually active before her first marriage (and was dismissed from service in Paris because of it.) This was changed to suit the novel; Mary was portrayed as a blushing young girl with little to no sexual experience. The Boleyns probably did not encourage Mary's active sex life, and she was probably at least seven years older than the novel suggested. Mary humiliated herself in the French court by her promiscuity, and was well famed for being the mistress of the French King, Frances I, before being dismissed. Her misbehavior shamed the Boleyn family and it was from this experience that Anne's refusal to be only a mistress to Henry VIII came - not the singular greed portrayed in this novel. Anne and George Boleyn were both genuinely religious, but this was not mentioned in the novel; neither was Anne's enormous influence over religious affairs and foreign policy.

However, what provoked the most savage criticism was the presentation of Anne Boleyn. One reviewer was outraged, claiming Anne had been presented as "a scheming trollop," (Guardian newspaper.) There was also some objections from feminist scholars, the vast majority of whom praise Anne Boleyn as a feminist icon.^[2] As queen, Anne was also a generous patron of charity and she saved many lives from the Inquisition in Europe. At one point in the novel, there is the allusion that Anne might have committed incest with her brother, in order to become pregnant. This twist in the story provoked the most outcry, one reason being that Anne had sworn upon the damnation of her soul in 1536 that she was absolutely innocent, leading some to feel that it was incredibly disrespectful to distort such a human tragedy in this manner. Interestingly, in one of the novel's sequels - The Boleyn Inheritance - one of the characters admits that she fabricated the evidence used in the trial against the two Boleyns. This implies that the two were innocent all along and it was simply gossip and innuendo which condemned them.

Again, some criticised Gregory because none of the sources Gregory listed in her bibliography supported the theory that Anne was guilty of the charges used at her trial. She had used two biographies of Anne - one by the American historian, Retha Warnicke and another by Marie-Louise Bruce. Both these writers insisted that Anne was innocent, as did books by David Loades, Alison Weir and Lacey Baldwin Smith that Gregory had used when researching the story. Warnicke later publicly distanced herself from Gregory's novel. The defence against such criticism is detailed above.

In 2003, the BBC made a ninety-minute drama based on The Other Boleyn Girl, shot with a relatively low production budget of £50,000 using modern camera techniques, and much of the script was improvised. Jodhi May played Anne Boleyn, Natascha McElhone played Mary, Steven Mackintosh played George, Jared Harris played Henry VIII, and Philip Glenister played Stafford. It received mixed reviews.

A movie adaptation of the book (with the same title) is due for a US release on February 29, 2008 (UK Mar 2008) with Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn, Natalie Portman as Anne, Eric Bana as Henry VIII and also starring Kristen Scott Thomas as Lady Elizabeth Boleyn, Mark Rylance as Sir Thomas Boleyn, Jim Sturgess as George Boleyn, Eddie Redmayne as William Stafford, Benedict Cumberbatch as Sir William Carey, and Bill Wallis as the Archbishop Cramner. The film also features appearances by the UK Model of the Year 2006/7, Siobhan Hustler, as Anne's Lady-in-Waiting and David Morrissey.

• The Other Boleyn Girl - Internet Movie Database
• The Other Boleyn Girl Television Movie Homepage
• Review of The Other Boleyn Girl
• The Other Boleyn Girl - Movie Website
• Other Boleyn Girl Trailer Fan Site (Comparison of Historic Figures and actors)

Philippa Gregory Official Website www.philippagregory.com