![]() ![]() ![]() Katheryn Howard’s choices in her relationship with Thomas Culpepper while married to Henry, and Jane Boleyn’s role in that relationship, can seem very odd based on what we know so can some of the things Katharine Parr is alleged to have said and done after Henry’s death, when she was married to Thomas Seymour (particularly in the incidents where Seymour was accused of flirting with and possibly sexually assaulting the young princess Elizabeth). The difficult nature of this task is definitely on display in both these last two volumes. This is not always easy when a writer has to incorporate known historical facts and contemporary accounts into a fictional story and make a character’s actions seem justified (at least to the character herself). While she may not be as brilliant a novelist as some others who have written about the Tudor period, she is the only writer I know of to have dedicated a full-length, well-developed novel to each of Henry’s queens, following each woman’s life from childhood to death, and told each story in a way that makes that woman’s choices believable in the context of what we know about her and her time. Weir’s competent handling of history in her turn from writing popular non-fiction to writing historical fiction continues here as she concludes the series. These two books conclude Alison Weir’s “Six Tudor Queens” series on the wives of Henry VIII, the earlier volumes of which I have reviewed here and here. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |