The Other Boleyn Girl

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

Philippa Gregory’s Inside Story: “This is in the throes of adaptation to be a stage play. It's really, really exciting. And I'm re-reading it, so had that really great pleasure of coming back to a book.

“You never know what success you’ll have with a book. I always embark upon with hope. But I had a real moment when I found Mary Boleyn. It was just really extraordinary. Every time I tell the story it sounds so unlikely, but it is genuinely true. I thought that I was going to write a story about female piracy. So I was looking at records of the Tudor Navy to basically research female piracy. I then came across the launching of a ship called Mary Boleyn, and so sat in the British Library said quietly to myself: 'That can't be right. It's got to be Anne Boleyn.' So I looked up Mary Boleyn in the index and thought: ‘What? Anne Boleyn had a sister? And this sister was so high in the favour of the king that he named a warship after her?’

“I then had a little search around for Mary Boleyn—and at time there was not a single biography on her. There was not even a published essay. She only lived in the footnotes of very detailed Victorian histories who were going into the legality of Henry's marriage to Anne, to which she was a legal obstacle because he had slept with her sister. And the only reason that was mentioned was because he said that the reason he couldn't be married to Catherine of Aragon was because she had slept with his brother, Prince Arthur. It was very arcane. Anne Boleyn was on the throne, she had a sister Mary and Mary was the king's greatest lover of all time. Madness! I almost had a desire to rush into print because I was sure that since I'd found it, somebody else would immediately find it after me.

“The Hollywood adaptation experience was really very extraordinary. It is like being picked up by a whirlwind and whirled about and told that all this is yours. And the next year, you're waiting for the invitations to Berlin Film Festival. It's very, very odd but hugely enjoyable. Some of the difficulties that I had with the adaptation were completely obscured by the really fantastic performances. It was so expensive, and you see so much of it on screen. It's such a glamorous film. Every now and then, it comes up again on television and I always see it with pleasure. It doesn't have any of the subtleties that I hope we're going to bring to the stage play, and it really is like Natalie Portman at one time said: ‘It's a catfight movie.’ And I said, ‘Oh, God. Yes, in a way, it's come down to that.’ But with that as the sort of foreground, in the background we're still saying a lot about women's power, women's rights and the way women are treated in the Tudor world.”