Anne Boleyn in Twenty-First-Century Historical Fiction
The twenty-first-century understanding of Anne’s story has been dominated by two narratives that represent Anne Boleyn from a postfeminist perspective: Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series. With the advent of digit
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Anne Boleyn in Twenty-First-Century Historical Fiction
The twenty-first century has seen the demand for Anne Boleyn fictions increase dramatically. The list of twenty-first-century fictions about Anne Boleyn exceeds that of the entire twentieth century, even though this century is only currently two decades long.1 The extraordinary proliferation of contemporary Anne Boleyn fictions can be partly attributed to the rise of self-publishing and e-books. Many of the books considered in this chapter are either only available on the Amazon Kindle platform, were self-published, or originated on the internet as activities related to fan practices. As I will outline, a distinct Anne Boleyn internet fandom has arisen in recent years, and this fandom has driven the demand for ever-more fictions with Anne at their centre. Two popular media properties have also influenced the proliferation of Anne Boleyn fictions: Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl and the television series The Tudors, which I will turn to in the final chapter. The extraordinary volume of Anne Boleyn fictions has resulted in an expansion of the range of Annes available to readers. While the twentieth century saw a master narrative about Anne emerge, in which Anne is widely assumed to have become ambitious and cruel as a result of her thwarted love for Henry Percy, twenty-first century writing about Anne is far more diverse in its interests, although some themes and patterns do emerge. What is perhaps distinctive about twenty-first-century historical fiction is the expectation that “good” historical fiction, especially in relation to women, is historical fiction that avoids replicating, or overtly challenges, 1
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© The Author(s) 2020 S. Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3_9
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ideologies that we would now consider racist or sexist. While twentieth- century writing was interested in making Anne relatable to contemporary readers, twenty-first-century historical fiction is usually far more transparent about its commitment to representing historical figures as recognisably modern people. That sometimes means historical figures are used as the mouthpiece for modern ideas; a large proportion of the Anne Boleyn fictions examined here use Anne to voice feminist political beliefs. As Katherine West Scheil has noted in her study of historical fiction about Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, reader reviews at sites like Goodreads reveal how contemporary audiences understand “these various Annes in relation to contemporary mores and expectations for women.”2 Scheil writes that readers “participate in a conversation about Shakespeare’s life as if he was a personal friend, and to play a part in critiquing, reviewing, and circulating the stories that should be told about him.”3 These same tendencies are manifested in Anne Boleyn fictions, which are often written by self-confessed fans and reflect the popular understanding of her character that has developed on social medi
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