The Boleyn Inheritance

The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory

Introduction

Philippa Gregory (born 9 January 1954) is an English historical novelist who has been publishing since 1987. The best known of her works is The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), which in 2002 won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award from the Romantic Novelists' Association^] and has been adapted into two separate films.  But there is so much more, as my niece Katharine shared with me in a recent email:

"Proper reply to your other email pending, but I just had to reply to your point about the Philippa Gregory books to ask how you're getting on with The Boleyn Inheritance? I do like Phillippa G, and yet at the same time I find her writing style so very...intense, for want of a better word, that I can't read several of her books one after another, I have to sort of intersperse them among others. That being said I think I've read almost all of them at one point or another (I do like the fact of her telling history from a female POV), and the historically accurate reading order (as opposed to publication order) based on the lives of the characters is...:

Plantagenets

The Lady of the Rivers

The White Queen

The Red Queen

The Kingmaker's Daughter

The White Princess - this encompasses the reigns of both Richard III and Henry VII, so crosses both Plantagenet and Tudor dynasties

Tudors

The Constant Princess

The King's Curse

Three Sisters, Three Queens

The Other Boleyn Girl

The Boleyn Inheritance

The Taming of the Queen

The Queen's Fool

The Virgin's Lover

The Last Tudor

The Other Queen

So what did I think of my first Philippa Gregory read?  First a synopsis:

1539. Henry VIII must take his fourth wife and the dangerous prize is won by Anne of Cleves. A German princess by birth, Anne is to be Henry’s pawn in the Protestant alliance against Rome, but the marriage falters from the start. Henry finds nothing to admire in his new queen, setting himself against his advisors and nobles to pay court to young Katherine Howard.

The new queen begins to sense a trap closing around her. And Jane Boleyn, summoned to the inner circle once more by her uncle the Duke of Norfolk, finds a fractious court haunted by the Boleyn legacy of death and deceit.  Nothing is certain in a kingdom ruled by an increasingly tyrannical king.

"I have just read The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory.  I did this as a favour to a French friend who is reading the Tudor novels because she is fascinated by Henry VIII.  The French seem to be much more knowledgeable about our royal heritage than many Brits I find. And very knowledgeable about their own royals in history.  Anyhow, I quite enjoyed the novel because I learnt something about those six hapless women who fell under the gaze of that lunatic Henry.  I know Gregory uses some literary licence with imagined conversations and minor incidents, all the same when I read some of the passages what was going through my mind was ‘Think Trump’!  An arrogant man who seems to think that the normal rules that should apply, in terms of morality and basic decency, to all human beings and certainly those in positions of power, don’t apply to him.  Henry manipulated the system to suit his obsessive sense of entitlement.  Sound familiar?  So I’m now going to read The Other Boleyn Girl so Brigitte and I can have a mini book group of two reviewing a book which we each read in our native language.  I think that means that by and large I enjoyed the read."

Gregory has her own website:

http://www.philippagregory.com/books