Anne Boleyn is my favorite female historical character. The fact that there are so many historical fiction books out there about her really pleases me. I’ve read many of them, so many that my boyfriend always asks, “Don’t you ever get sick of reading the same stories over and over?” I always answer him with a no. Yes, it’s the same basic plot line but each author of each book brings something different to the table. Lately there’s been a movement to portray Anne Boleyn in a better light, now that historians recognize that she was not an adulterer but was a political pawn and scapegoat, so that Henry the VIII could get rid of her and marry Jane Seymour. Alison Weir, Jean Plaidy, Robin Maxwell, Susannah Dunn, and many other writers follow this trend, as does the television show The Tudors. (Well, the parts that are historically accurate. Some parts, such as Mary Tudor’s marriage to and murder of the King of Portugal, rather than the King of France… ugh don’t get me started…) Philippa Gregory however takes us one giant step backward in The Other Boleyn Girl, where she insinuates that Anne Boleyn was a bitch, a whore, and committed incest resulting in a disfigured baby with her brother George.
Jean Plaidy is a champion for Anne Boleyn. She researched very well for The Lady in the Tower and was able to make Anne seem very real. Unlike some writers, Jean Plaidy includes the rumors of the “sixth finger” on Anne, making it out to be a deformed fingernail on her pinky finger. While many historic fiction writers make Anne Boleyn seem like a real person, Jean Plaidy does it the best. Anne’s hot-headedness, stubborness, confrontational personality, her humor and love of life, and her desire to keep good-looking, smart, and witty men who admired her around her (though she never became involved with any of them beyond friendship; she was not a very sexual person after the shame her sister Mary brought to her after her affairs in the French court) all remind me of my best friend Natalie. Whenever I tried to imagine the story in my head, I would see Anne Boleyn portrayed by Natalie. This only strengthened the connection I feel to Anne. I LOVE to read. I mean, I’m crazy about it. And I always end up feeling strong connections to many of the characters. But in The Lady in the Tower, that connection was even stronger. Even though I knew what happened at the end of Anne’s story was inevitable, I found myself very emotional at the end of the book.
