The Other Boleyn Girl: A Literary Analysis

The publication of Walter Scott’s Waverly changed Europe’s relationship with its history permanently. The past had long been of interest only to dusty scholars but , the advent of historical fiction threw historys doors open to the masses. History became a pillar of national and cultural identity, as well as a mean of understanding politics and society. Yet can historical fiction truly be a tool for education? Can portrayals of history be both accurate and entertaining? Or must one be sacrificed for the same of the other? First, we must define what is meant by historical accuracy. History, after all, is not an exact science. The past no longer exists, so how could we measure the accuracy of our view of it? Instead, history is a method of

Of course both Wolf Hall and The Other Boleyn Girl were written primarily as entertainment. But this doesn’t cancel out their responsibility to educate. The choice of both authors to use real word events as a backdrop to their rather than a fictional setting means that readers perception of history become influenced by the stories they choose to tell. Both Wolf Hall and The Other Boleyn Girl sold millions of copies, and the former was adapted into both a hugely popular stage show and TV drama and the latter became a blockbuster movie. How many of those readers went on to study Tudor history in-depth? Likely very few. Most would have taken the fiction of the books as fact. This is worrying. Both books cover a vitally important part of British history. Henry VIII’s split from the Catholic Church, and the cocktail of sexual desire, dynastic ambition and theological disputation that inspired it, changed the course of European history and started a bloody reformation that claimed hundreds of lives. And, less obviously, Henry’s changes to the monarch-parliament dynamic would set England on the course to civil war. And so one could claim to understand modern Britain, one should understand 1530s Britain. But with many getting their information from poorly-researched books that distort history for dramatic effect, no one is getting a clear

An issue as simple as the appearance of Anne Boleyn causes a great deal of contention. Historians greatly vary in their opinion on Anne’s looks. Contemporary sources vary greatly. In the same year a friend described her as y “beautiful and with an elegant figure”, letters were sent in which she was reviled as greatly deformed . These descriptions are naturally all informed by personal bias. Those singing the praises of Anne’s charms were supporters, attempting to advertise her to all of Europe as a bride fit for a king and a youthful, attractive alternative to the fading Catherine of Aragon. Yet her political opponents told the world she was a monster. Medieval Europeans believed physical attractiveness to be tied to spiritual righteousness and by deriding Anne as greatly ugly, they implied that she was also spiritually