Anne Boleyn from 1950 to 2000
The second half of the twentieth century saw the concretisation of the narrative that Anne was a woman who turned to ambition and revenge after disappointment in love. However, novels increasingly represented Anne as a second-wave feminist who rejects lov
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Anne Boleyn from 1950 to 2000
The historical novels of the first half of the twentieth century standardised many elements of how we have come to understand Anne’s story. The historical romance novel continued to grow in popularity throughout the latter half of the century, and novelistic representations of Anne became ever more plentiful. That the personal was political was one of the central maxims for the second-wave feminist movement and so an exploration of the impact of Anne’s personal life upon the state was again ideally suited to the interests of the period. Most of the topoi that had, by this point, become entrenched in historical fictions about Anne continued to hold the status of received wisdom. Anne was routinely represented as motivated by either ambition or revenge, for example, and the assumption that she did not genuinely love Henry was consistently reiterated. A rare exception is Linda-Dawn Reeve’s 1980s trilogy. In the last novel, Condemned, Anne manifests little interest in either religion or power, but instead comments breathlessly on Henry’s “extremely well built” body.1 However, in most novels, if Anne did love at all, another man was assumed to be the object of her desire, and more erotically charged historical fiction was written about those imagined relationships. While continuities in Anne Boleyn fictions across the century persist, there are also significant shifts visible in representations of Anne from the mid-century onwards. The early century saw many changes in the ways in which gender and sexuality were understood, but the rise of the 1
Linda-Dawn Reeve, Condemned (London: Robert Hale, 1981), 11.
© The Author(s) 2020 S. Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3_8
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second-wave feminist movement brought even more significant social, cultural and political changes. These changes inevitably effected the ways in which women, power and gender relations were represented in writing by and about women. Deborah Philips argues of romance fiction of the period that “the model heroine is inevitably in dialogue with the challenges of the women’s movement.”2 Representations of Anne Boleyn are no exception. As Diana Wallace writes: Women’s fiction at this point splits between the ‘serious’ novel, typically confessional realism concerned with women’s predicament in the contemporary moment and consciously eschewing the romance plot, and the ‘popular’ novel, epitomised by the popular romance with its happy ending.3
Historical fictions about Anne Boleyn sit uncomfortably within this paradigm because most fit firmly within the popular romance mode, but as history dictates, these novels also cannot have a happy ending. The attempt to conform to genre expectations while at the same time not being able to provide a satisfactory resolution is a problem with which many late-century novels about Anne grapple. As Wallace has shown, at a time when discussion around women’s power, or lack thereof, was central to the public con
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