A Nun with a Book, and more on Anne Boleyn

The Concubine by Norah Lofts

published 1963

 

 

Following on from this post earlier in the week:

Anne Boleyn's Imaginary Stepmother (low class and scandalous)

-       This is the book that set me off in pursuit of Anne Boleyn’s lost stepmother.

I read it because of a post I did on childhood reading, and whether children should read whatever they like.

Childhood reading and intellectual freedom

Here is  part of a comment by blogfriend CLM/Constance:

A nun, who was the librarian at my school when I was 12, was pleased to hear I liked historical fiction and found me The Concubine by Norah Lofts.  I liked this very much but was afraid concubine was a bad word so hid it successfully at home (I guess it didn't occur to me that a nun was unlikely to give me something I'd be forbidden to read). 

Several of us were intrigued by all of this: a nun giving out a book with that title? would our mothers have approved?- and in my case, why had I never heard of this one? I loved historical novels, and read shedloads of them, but perhaps my school library did not like the title either. It was quite a daring choice by Lofts, I’m going to say, and it could have had many other titles.

It is a fictionalized version of Anne Boleyn’s story from the age of 16 to her death (Spoiler!) in 1536. Boleyn was the second wife of Henry VIII.

Norah Lofts was a seasoned and prolific writer, and has actually appeared on the blog before,

The Importance of Christmas Presents

-       With a crime story, a different name and gender, and the story of my uncovering all this to make sense of the book. She obviously sets me off into investigative mode.

I ordered it immediately, and The Concubine was an interesting and easy read. She uses different POVs throughout: Anne, the King, members of her family. She gives Anne a servant who becomes devoted to her, and we see some of the story through her eyes: this was one of the tropes I disliked most in traditional historical novels, but it is not quite so annoying here.

My claim is that Phliippa Gregory changed the whole style of historical fiction, particularly with The Other Boleyn Girl, so relevant here. No more twinkly-eyed devoted servants, and no loss, and a more realistic view of people’s motives and sexuality. (there are other writers who still continue with the old ways I’m sorry to say).

Immersed as many of us are in the The Other Boleyn Girl, or the Wolf Hall trilogy, or both (that would be me) it is easy to forget how lacking in facts we are about Anne Boleyn, and how any version of her life is full of speculation – and Norah Lofts is just as entitled to go for it as anyone else. For example, I say above that she follows Anne from the age of 16, but nobody knows for certain when she was born, her age is always a guess. We don’t even know for sure where she came in the family – older or younger than brother George and sister Mary? (Mary’s children said she, Mary, was the older, but as this was stated in order to claim a title, I think we can view their views with care)

It’s such a compelling and strange story, it would be hard to fail with a novel, and Lofts I think does very well, though it is a book of it’s time. Henry and Anne speak as if they are undergoing 1960s couples counselling. ‘Their whole relationship was wrong, and was she much to blame?’

Lofts imagines herself into Henry’s head, giving him a disappointing first sexual experience with Anne, and she has Catherine of Aragon worrying about her own role in what happened. Mary Boleyn is an interesting figure – very different from Gregory’s version, but very much her own character, well-drawn and memorable, trying to understand Henry and warn Anne, while at the same time sometimes being  annoying. George scarcely appears.

Lofts does assign thoughts and feelings to her characters – and fair enough in a novel. Late on we have this about Henry:

Deep inside the bulky body with its ulcerating leg, inside the mind hard-shelled with egoism and corrupted by power, the young Henry Tudor, gay and just and high-hearted stirred once, perhaps for the last time.

‘I never wanted this,’ he said.

At the head of each chapter there is a quotation from contemporaneous sources, or from biographies of the main players.

The exception is chapter 33, where the epigraph is:

I do not say that this is how it happened; I only say that this is how it could have happened,

Your Author

In this chapter she outlines how she thinks Anne B may have got pregnant the final time: that last desperate throw – if she had managed to bring a boy to full-term, history would surely have been very different. There have been various theories about it: this one is strange and fanciful, but – we don’t know. Could be true.

Lofts take a lot of her tale, and many of the chapter headings,  from Agnes Strickland’s The Lives of the Queens of England (as explained in the previous entry), including of course the stepmother – who is actually a great character and adds to the story as fiction. She also includes the malformation of the little finger of Anne’s left hand from Strickland. Modern historians seem not so sure about this. And then at the end of both books there is a strange fate for Anne’s body, which was buried in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower of London. Lofts and Strickland say there is a strong local history suggests it was secretly moved to Norfolk. It certainly rounds off the story in an intriguing way.

If a person is writing fiction then they can give their own version, they are not tied to facts and they don’t have to prove anything. I think this book stands up well, I found it an easy and compelling read. Well done CLM’s nun…

The style of the two paintings seemed in keeping with the style of the book.

 

By Daniel Maclise - Sotheby's, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24563100

 

By William Powell Frith - bridgeman.co.uk, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9084813