Anne Boleyn from 1900 to 1950
As the women’s historical novel became an increasingly popular form, novels about Anne Boleyn proliferated. These novels stressed Anne’s relatability to female readers, with Mary Hasting Bradley’s novel The Favor of Kings, for example, presenting Anne as
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Anne Boleyn from 1900 to 1950
The quantity of fictional representations of Anne Boleyn increased markedly in the twentieth century. This chapter and the next will consider the plethora of representations that span the twentieth century, but each can only be an incomplete account. The sheer volume of historical novels alone that address Anne’s story that emerge over the century could fill its own full-length volume.1 For the twentieth-century writer, Anne’s story was attractive because it was the ultimate synthesis of the political and the personal at a time when thinking through the impact of the political on the personal, and vice versa, was an increasingly important strategy for the first generations of feminist activists. Her story also combined domestic tragedy with political change in a period when two world wars were making these themes all too real. Anne’s life was historically distant enough to provide nostalgic glamour and colour to wartime readers, while remaining recognisable to contemporary women grappling with dramatic social, cultural and political shifts. Anne’s story also resembled popular melodrama; Anne was the other woman who intervened in a long-standing marriage, and so historical novels about her life resembled other popular novels and films of the period. In attempting to account for the broad range of representations of Anne over the course of the early twentieth century, this chapter will consider the rise of the women’s historical novel and continuities of representational patterns found in novels about Anne Boleyn, 1 Please see the Appendix for a full list of all Anne Boleyn fictions across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
© The Author(s) 2020 S. Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3_7
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before turning to a broader consideration of some of the thematic differences that occur between accounts in relation to agency and sexuality. The history of Anne Boleyn fictions during the twentieth century is itself a potted history of women’s popular fiction of the twentieth century, both reflecting upon and resisting changing understandings of femininity, gender relations and sexuality.
The Rise of the Woman’s Historical Novel The early twentieth century has long been identified as the period which marked the rise of the woman’s historical novel and, indeed, most of the novels considered in this chapter and the next were written by women and marketed to female readers. The Tudor historical novel became so dominated by women writers in the twentieth century that after 1950, there are vanishingly few male writers producing historical novels about Anne. Diana Wallace has dated the rise of the woman’s historical novel to the period after the First World War: “It was after the First World War that British women, entering into history as enfranchised citizens for the first time, turned to the historical novel in substantial numbers and reshaped it in forms which expressed and answered their needs and desires.”2 O
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