Anne Boleyn from 1900 to 1950

Russo, Stephanie

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3_7

Stephanie Russo⁴

Part of the book series: Queenship and Power ((QAP))

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Abstract

As the women’s historical novel became an increasingly popular form, novels about Anne Boleyn proliferated. These novels stressed Anne’s relatability to female readers, with Mary Hasting Bradley’s novel The Favor of Kings, for example, presenting Anne as a “normal” girl who becomes involved in extraordinary events. The early twentieth century also saw a master narrative about Anne’s life emerge: Anne is imagined to be genuinely in love with Henry Percy, and it is only when she is divided from him that she turns to ambition. That ambition, and her desire to revenge herself on either the King or Cardinal Wolsey, eventually brings about her downfall. In novels such as Margaret Campbell Barnes’s Brief Gaudy Hour, Anne is imagined as the Tudor equivalent to Scarlett O’Hara.

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Notes

1.
Please see the Appendix for a full list of all Anne Boleyn fictions across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
2.
Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 25.
3.
Alison Light, “‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up,” Feminist Review 33 (1989): 59.
4.
Helen Hughes, The Historical Romance (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 1993), 1.
5.
Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 79.
6.
Wallace, 80.
7.
Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2009), 68.
8.
Groot, 73.
9.
Many of the novels examined in this chapter feature, for example, Anne’s fictional stepmother and her equally fictional governess Simonette. Both of these characters are derived not from the historical record, but from the works of Agnes Strickland (see Chap. 5). Historical novelists are therefore either reading Strickland in the original or reading other historical novels that use Strickland as a source. They then replicate her errors, despite the fact that Anne’s early twentieth-century biographers, such as Philip Sergeant, had already pointed out that Anne’s mother actually outlived her (see Philip W. Sergeant, The Life of Anne Boleyn (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1923)).
10.
Reginald Farrer, The Anne-Queen’s Chronicle (London: Alston Rivers, 1909), xxiv.
11.
Jessie Armstrong, My Friend Anne: A Story of the Sixteenth Century (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1901), v.
12.
Armstrong, 45.
13.
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006,” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007): 8.
14.
Mary Hastings Bradley, The Favor of Kings (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1912), 11.
15.
Bradley, 11.
16.
Bradley, 22.
17.
Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014), 165.
18.
Burstein, “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn,” 7.
19.
E. Barrington, Anne Boleyn (London: Amazon, 1932), 31.
20.
Burstein, “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn,” 12.
21.
Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 54–57.
22.
Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), 10.
23.
Armstrong, My Friend Anne: A Story of the Sixteenth Century, 45.
24.
E. Barrington, Anne Boleyn , 20. Mark Smeaton is also repeatedly described in the novel as a quasi-mythic figure, a “goatish” man (63) or a “rustic English pan” (69).
25.
For more on Margaret Murray’s argument that Anne was a practising pagan, see Roland Hui, “Anne of the Wicked Ways: Perceptions of Anne Boleyn as a Witch in History and in Popular Culture,” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 1 (2018): 97–118. Anne and Henry are married in a Pagan ceremony in Maureen Peter’s 1969 novel Anne, the Rose of Hever.
26.
Nicole Beauman, A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914–39 (London: Virago Press, 1983), 149.
27.
Barrington, 10.
28.
Barrington, 122.
29.
Barrington, 273.
30.
Jean Plaidy was the pseudonym of Eleanor Hibbert, who wrote under a plethora of names. Under the name Jean Plaidy, Hibbert wrote novels about virtually every famous royal woman, including novels focusing on each of Henry’s queens, as well as novels about other Tudor women. Anne is necessarily a character in other Plaidy novels, such as her three-volume series on Catherine of Aragon. However, here I have focused solely on the novels in which Anne is the principal focalising character.
31.
Jean Plaidy, Murder Most Royal (London: Arrow Books, 2006), 319.
32.
Plaidy, 18.
33.
Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 137.
34.
Karen Lindsey, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995).
35.
Megan L. Hickerson, “‘Anne Taught Him How to Be Cruel’: Henry VIII in Modern Historical Fiction,” in Henry VIII and History, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Thomas S. Freeman (London: Routledge, 2012), 230 (223–40).
36.
Plaidy, Murder Most Royal, 384.
37.
Jenna Elizabeth Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature” (Stellenbosch University, 2014), 84.
38.
Stephen Watt, “Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan’ and the Modern History Play,” Comparative Drama 19, no. 1 (1985): 66.
39.
Edgar Lee Masters, “Henry VIII & Ann Boleyn,” in Dramatic Duologues: Four Short Plays in Verse (New York & Los Angeles: Samuel French, 1934), 4 (3–18).
40.
Masters, 16.
41.
W.S. Pakenham-Walsh, Anne Boleyn, or, The Queen of May: A Play in Four Acts (London: Erskine Macdonald, 1921), 13.
42.
For more information about Pakenham-Walsh’s ghost memoir, see Stephanie Russo, “At the Border of Life and Death: The Ghost of Anne Boleyn,” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37.2 (2020), forthcoming.
43.
Pakenham-Walsh, Anne Boleyn, or, The Queen of May: A Play in Four Acts, 115, 118.
44.
Maxwell Anderson, Anne of the Thousand Days, Acting Edi (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1950), 4.
45.
Anderson, 23.
46.
Anderson, 49.
47.
Anderson, 57.
48.
Anderson, 74.
49.
Hsu-Ming Teo, Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 89.
50.
Beauman, A Very Great Profession, 187.
51.
Bradley, The Favor of Kings, 72.
52.
Barrington, Anne Boleyn, 164.
53.
Peter Albery, The Uncommon Marriage (London: Elek Books, 1960).
54.
Jenna Elizabeth Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism,” 78.
55.
Plaidy, Murder Most Royal, 51.
56.
Plaidy, 210.
57.
Julie Crane, “Whoso List to Hunt: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. K. Cooper and E. Short (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 78 (76–91).
58.
Francis Hackett, Queen Anne Boleyn (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1939), 17.
59.
Hackett, 126.
60.
Philip Lindsay, The Queen’s Confession (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1947), 479.
61.
Lindsay, 189, original emphasis.
62.
Lindsay, 344.
63.
Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–1960 (Hanover & London: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 11.
64.
Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 50.
65.
Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans (London: Virago Press, 1989), 9.
66.
I am not the first person to observe that Barnes’s Anne resembles Scarlett O’Hara. Marian Kensler, writing as Sonetka at the BoleynBooks website, also makes this point: Marian Kensler, “Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (1949) by Margaret Campbell Barnes,” Anne Boleyn Novels, 2012, https://anneboleynnovels.wordpress.com/2012/07/14/brief-gaudy-hour-a-novel-of-anne-boleyn-by-margaret-campbell-barnes-1949/
67.
Margaret Campbell Barnes, Brief Gaudy Hour (Naperville: Sourcebooks Landmark, 2008), 1.
68.
Barnes, 7.
69.
Barnes, 125.
70.
Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn, 173.
71.
Barnes, Brief Gaudy Hour, 234.
72.
Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (London & Sydney: Pan Books, 1974), 1011.
73.
Barnes, Brief Gaudy Hour, 375.
74.
Lozania Prole, The Dark-Eyed Queen (London: Robert Hale, 1967); Margaret Heys, Anne Boleyn (London: Sphere Books, 1967).
75.
Kathleen Winsor, Forever Amber (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000).
76.
Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 5.
77.
Emily Purdy, The Tudor Wife (London: Avon, 2010), 9.
78.
The play was written for a 1940 production by the New Jersey Woman’s Club, and so Haynes inevitably had a limited group of actresses with which to work.
79.
Kenneth Haynes, Mistress Minx: An Episode in the Early Life of Anne Boleyn (Boston & Los Angeles: Baker’s Plays, 1940), 22.
80.
Haynes.
81.
Haynes, 46.

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Stephanie Russo

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Russo, S. (2020). Anne Boleyn from 1900 to 1950. In: The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3_7
Published: 29 October 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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