The Other Boleyn Girl
A Novel
by Philippa Gregory
List Price: $7.99
Pages: 752
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781416556534
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Trade
Philippa Gregory is the author of fourteen books, one of which, Wideacre, was a New York Times bestseller. She holds a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century literature from the University of Edinburgh and lives in England.
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Q: What made you pick Mary, the other Boleyn girl, as the character to tell the story of Anne's ascendancy and eventual fall?
PG: I found Mary, rather than "picked" her. I was delighted to come across a character who was in the spotlight, but mostly in the wings of one of the most intriguing periods of British history, and her relationship to Anne was something that I knew would be stimulating and provocative.
Q: Why do you think she's the best narrator here?
PG: I think history is always more interested when told by the "losers" or those on the margins. This is because most conventional history is that of the "winners," so you get a different slant. But because she is badly treated by her family and by the king, it is possible to show her development from naive and trusting and very young girl, to a woman who is ready to turn her back on the court. The way she tells the story is also part of the story itself.
Q: Is Mary a real person? If so, what is actually known about her?
PG: We have the barest details about her. We know that she was born at Hever Castle in Kent, that she married William Carey, as in the novel, that she was the queen's lady-in-waiting and the king's mistress. That she was supplanted by her sister Anne, that her husband died of the sweat and she remarried a poor man for love and went to live in Essex, as in the novel. The invention of the novel is her motives and feelings; the broad facts of her life are accurate.
Q: How about Mary and Anne's brother, George? Did he really sleep with his sister so that she could give Henry a son?
PG: Nobody can know the answer to this one. Anne was accused of adultery with George at their trials and his wife gave evidence against them both. Most people think the trial was a show trial, but it is an interesting accusation. Anne had three miscarriages by the time of her trial, and she was not a woman to let something like sin or crime stand in her way -- she was clearly guilty of one murder. I think if she had thought that Henry could not bear a son she was quite capable of finding someone to father a child on her. If she thought that, then George would have been the obvious choice.
Q: It's uncommon to read about homosexuality in Henry VIII's court. Why do you think it's important to include it here?
PG: This is based on the interesting thesis of Retha M. Warnicke, who suggests that the circle around Anne Boleyn was a homosexual group, and it is his homosexuality that George apologizes for on the scaffold.
Q: The blending of fact and fiction in The Other Boleyn Girl is seamless. You manage to pull together an incredible amount of history and political and socio-economic information. How do you research such a wide-ranging story?
PG: I always start by reading the secondary sources (the accepted histories of the period) and I aim to read all of the major works. Then I do a very schoolgirlish thing: I make an enormous chart, which I stick up on my wall with the schedule of dates on it. With one of my novels I did very fancy transparency overlays which showed the progress of the wars, the weather, the location of each character, and the profile of the plague years. With The Other Boleyn Girlit showed all the dates that the characters were at court, where the court physically was -- since it is constantly moving from one palace to another -- and the moving to and from court of the various characters. I also showed the rise and fall of various subplayers. Especially I note the dates of birth of the children and miscarriages, and count backward so we know when a child was conceived. I visit the principal sites of the story -- the royal palaces and parks. I visit any museums, art galleries, and collections of the period, and sometimes I discuss with an expert historian as to what are the principal interesting issues of the period. Then I put my notebooks to one side and only consult them for factual detail, and try to write from memory and a sense of time and place. Otherwise, the detail of the research blocks the flow of the story. In the second draft I check everything all over again!
Q: How do you determine what to use and where to fill in a piece of the story?
PG: The history is the structure of the story; that gives me the plot. Some of the history is debatable -- the accusation of witchcraft and incest is a case in point and then, like any historian, I make a choice. Unlike a historian I choose the best and most convincing story for my narrative, but all the choices can be defended as historical probability. I wouldn't call the fiction a "fill-in." It's a different process altogether. It's where the historical story comes alive to me and I make it live for the reader. It's where my research historical persona stops and my creative fiction writing persona starts. The history is the skeleton and the fiction is the breath.
Q: Your depiction of Anne's exhaustive pursuit of Henry is wonderfully vivid; the reader actually feels the exhaustion and madness of it all. Do you think Anne was driven crazy with her desire for power, or had she always been so determined and single-minded?
PG: The suggestion in The Other Boleyn Girlis that Anne's disappointment when she cannot marry Henry Percy hardens her heart for the rest of her life. I think this is quite plausible. Also, I think that once she had started on her campaign to enthrall him there was no easy way out. She did not dare to sleep with him, which would have destroyed her chances of being his wife, but no one could have thought that it would take so long for him to get free. I think it turned into an agonizing and maddening marathon, I imagine at first she thought that if she could catch him, he would be free of Queen Katherine within a year.
Q: Why do you think Anne was so blind to her own fate, especially after she saw what happened to Queen Katherine?
PG: She saw Queen Katherine initially treated with tremendous respect. It was Anne who set the pace against Katherine. I don't think anyone would have dreamed that a queen could be beheaded. And also, what could Anne do? After her final miscarriage Henry simply turned against her. She could have been blind, she could have been thoroughly conscious, there was nothing she could do to save herself. And everything she could do -- in terms of agreeing to a divorce and agreeing to exile -- she did do.
Q: What are some of the purely fabricated parts of The Other Boleyn Girl that you can reveal to us?
PG: Everything which deals with feelings and motivations are creative work rather than research work, of course. The councils of the Boleyn/Howard family undoubtedly took place, but I have invented them and their increasing ambition. Some court events like the winter fair where Jane Seymour is so symbolically pushed around towards the King on her whalebone skates are invented, but there was a particularly hard winter that year. The courtship of William and Mary is invented, but we know that he was a man in her uncle's train and that they married for love because she wrote a most passionate letter in defense of her choice of him. The witchcraft is all invented, but I think it would have been tempting to take advice.
Q: Why do you enjoy writing historical fiction?
PG: I love history, and I love the sense of recapturing the past. I like the great spread of it, and having so much material to work with. And I am very pleased when I can tell a slightly different story from the conventional one, especially if it makes readers see the more usual story in a different light. I like to give people a sense of a different sort of past. I like to challenge the conventional views.
Q: Why do you think people are so drawn to historical fiction?
PG: It's such an interesting question now that historical fiction is so popular again. First I think that contemporary fiction has become fractured into many different styles and people don't find it satisfying. Slim literary novels, unreadable literary experiments, incredibly dull self-analysis novels, horrendous childhood abuse novels. All these different forms fail readers who want to enjoy an absorbing story which will create a fictional world. Why history? I think people want to know where they came from and where they are going, and stories about the past satisfy that. I think this is such a fundamental desire that it is not surprising that people choose to read historical fiction. The other great ingredient is that historical fiction has become a lot better written, better researched, and more interesting in the last few years. Very fine writers like Antonia Byatt, Rose Tremaine, and Margaret Atwood have written novels which have raised the standard of writing. Other writers, me among them, have raised the standards of research. I think the historical novel has got better, and now it is attracting more readers.
Q: What do you want people to take away from The Other Boleyn Girl?
PG: First I'd like them to take away a terrific reading experience which has absorbed them and moved them and excited them. I'd like them to have a new vision of the Tudor period and some interesting information about the role of women and the inequality of English society. I hope they understand that while the Tudor court was glamorous there was deep poverty and that was a normal way of life. I hope they get a sense of the Tudor landscape, the courts and the city of London, and the countryside. And I hope they get an insight into the psychology of the characters.
Excerpted from The Other Boleyn Girl © Copyright 2008 by Philippa Gregory. Reprinted with permission by Simon & Schuster Trade. All rights reserved.
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