I Can’t Stop Thinking About…The Other Boleyn Girl

Turns out the way to rediscover your love of history is through historical romances from the late 2000s.

Author

Erin Kayata
August 30, 2023


If you're on TikTok, you’ve likely seen videos making fun of people’s childhood historical obsessions. Were you a Titanic girl? An Anastasia conspiracy theorist?

Me, I was a Tudors girl.

My childhood interest in history spurred from the classroom where I got to study the past at a micro-level. I still remember assignments where I got to dress up as Anne Hutchinson, Marie Antoinette, and the pope. I had a placemat featuring all the U.S. presidents and their biographical information that I would fight my brother and sister for at every meal. The events were one thing, but the people? They were the interesting part.

Between memorizing the presidents in order and binge-watching Liberty’s Kids on PBS, my dad went to Europe for work. He was up for a position that would’ve moved us there for a year and I was devastated at the thought of leaving the comfort of my elementary school where I knew everyone’s name.

As a consolation, my dad brought me the one type of gift guaranteed to win me over: a book. Specifically, he brought back a special edition of the Horrible Histories series focused on the British monarchs. The move didn’t stick; my Anglophilia did.

Please note I don’t love this cover now because beheading wives is nothing to joke of

Maybe it was the fact I was raised on Disney princess movies, but I got super into the monarchy. My two favorite books after the Horrible Histories were “Doomed Queen Anne” and “Beware, Princess Elizabeth” (both by Carolyn Meyer) about Anne Boleyn/Elizabeth I, respectively. I was so inspired, I wrote poems in my journal from the POV of Princess Elizabeth from when she was imprisoned in the Tower of London (normal!).

As I got to high school, history classes turned to cramming in as much info as possible throughout the course of the year. Projects that made the past real turned into fretting over writing assignments and a heavy textbook where events that changed the course of lives were reduced to a few paragraphs. I can’t tell you about one assignment I did during that time. I spent most of my A.P. U.S History class doodling.

As is so often the case, school sucked the fun out of my hobbies once they became work Even when I got back my childhood love of books that I lost from assigned reading, I could count on one hand how many historical fiction novels I read in a year. Still, when I found a $2 copy of “The Other Boleyn Girl” in the used bookstore of the Stamford library, I bought it. But it sat untouched except to be moved between apartments.

I finally cracked open “The Other Boleyn Girl” in early 2022, almost six years after I first picked it up. I had a trip to London coming up and in anticipation, I decided to revisit my old friends, the Tudors.

Hello Anne, my old friend

If you somehow missed it during 2008, “The Other Boleyn Girl” follows Mary Boleyn, Anne Boleyn’s older sister. (In the book, she’s younger, but I’ll get into that in a second.) It tells the story of Mary’s affair with Henry VIII which predated her sister’s marriage, plus her perspective on Anne’s rise to the top. It’s hardly fact, but it was something. I packed it in my backpack with my tickets to Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London.

A few nights before I left, I started reading. In the opening scene, Mary, 13, is watching her uncle be executed. She thinks it’s all a farce until the axe falls and her mother calls her a fool for thinking it a farce.

“Watch and learn, Mary,” she says. “There is no room for mistakes at court.”

I was hooked—not just for the description of the drums beating and the outfits and the food Mary would eat later, though those things did all suck me in. But the stakes seemed real. Finally, the pieces began to fall into place in a way they hadn’t since I last read historical fiction as a kid. This wasn’t just dates of battles and laws. There was a cultural context to the past that impacted the way people lived then and the actions they took that changed history. And the history was…interesting?

I needed to stay in that world. That summer, my boyfriend and I made our annual pilgrimage to Book Barn, a bucolic spot tucked away on the Connecticut shoreline that sells used books. You need, say, books in a series that reached peak fervor 12-15 years prior? You got ‘em. I spent less than $50 on a stack of Philippa Gregory books so big I could barely carry them.

You thought I was joking??

Any reporter (like me!) can tell you there’s a reason anecdotal leads—as trite as they can be—do well. Stories are more interesting when they have a face behind them, a character for whom to root. The same applies to history. Frankly, I don’t care about England’s schism from the Catholic church on its own. What I do care about is the real woman who was raised to be Queen of England and got divorced because she couldn’t have a son.

That’s what these books gave me: the anecdotes that made history real. The more I read, the more I see that these figures were as layered as the women I know and love in my own life. I see myself in Katherine of Aragon’s force of will, in Anne Boleyn’s outspokenness, and in Katherine Parr’s intellectualism.

I can’t talk about Philippa Gregory without mentioning that her books have been panned by Tudor scholars with good reason. Her grasp on history is loose, to say the least. Some of the events she fabricates range from baffling (making Mary Anne’s younger sister when she was actually her older sister) to actually offensive (the Anne and George Boleyn incest storyline really served no purpose). Like other historical fiction writers I’ve since read, she clearly has her favorite figures and she writes many of these women into mere tropes which is frustrating at best. (I actually wonder if Gregory was a descendant of Jane Seymour or maybe Catherine of Aragon because she turned Anne Boleyn into a straight-up cartoon villain who took custody of her sister’s son.)

However inaccurate, Gregory’s work helped me find my way back to history and to all the doors it can unlock. As a journalist, I live for facts and for every few Philippa Gregory books I read, I read a nonfiction book to get the true story.

My budding Tudor collection in its infancy

After reading about Anne Neville, wife of the notorious Richard III, in “The Kingmaker’s Daughter,” I wanted to know more about Richard III. I read Alison Weir’s “Richard III and The Princes in the Tower” and—unsatisfied with her extremist take—decided to get the other side with “The Lost King” by Philippa Langley and Michael Jones. And of course, you can’t study Richard III without reading Shakespeare’s “Richard III.”

On Saturday night, my boyfriend and I ended up in another bookstore, this time my beloved Harvard Book Store (which has a British history section that’s to die for). The copy of Richard III in stock—with Richard’s boar emblem on the front and back—called my name.

Waiting for my train home, I started flipping through my copy. Like “The Other Boleyn Girl,” I assumed this would sit on my shelf unread for awhile. After all, what’s more intimidating than Shakespeare? But as I read through Richard’s opening monologue, it made sense knowing the history at the time the show takes place. I kept reading and it kept clicking. With each line, my world was expanding into something I didn’t imagine before—in this case, casually diving into Shakespeare on the T—and all thanks to the love I thought I lost and the pesky, inaccurate writer who dragged me back in.

I also can’t stop thinking about…