Book Review: The Other Boleyn Girl

Title: The Other Boleyn Girl

Author: Philippa Gregory

Published: Touchstone, 2004

Rating: 3.5/5

Gregory has fully mastered giving a voice to her character and pulling her readers into the Tudor time era, the enormous liberties she has taken with historical events did her novel no credit. If a reader was to approach “The Other Boleyn Girl” purely has a work of fiction, they might readily enjoy this novel. Those that have prior education on the Tudor era might have a harder time enjoying this book.

Mary Boleyn, at the tender age of 15, is forced to cuckold her husband, William Carey, by becoming the mistress of Henry VIII. Forced to accept her fate for the advancement of her family, she bears the King a daughter and then a son. While she labors in childbirth her sister, Anne, steals the attentions of the King. Weak with lust and love the King breaks away from the Church of Rome in his will to marry Anne.

While I applaud Gregory for telling her interpretation of the life of Mary Boleyn, her distorted representation of Anne Boleyn is slanderous. While Anne Boleyn did indeed wish for Katherine of Aragon’s death and treated Mary Tudor in a horrendous manner, she never did seek custody of her sister’s son. For that matter, Henry Carey, the son of Mary Boleyn, was more than likely not the son of Henry VIII. Nor did she commit incest with her brother, which is implied in several scenes throughout the novel.

I admire Gregory’s ability to weave the “what if?” into her novels but I have enjoyed this work less than her others. I am not saying this is a poorly written novel; on the contrary, it is a well written story if you only approach as a story. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend a historical fiction novel about Mary Boleyn that follows historical events more accurately, because there is none.

Little is known about the life of Mary Boleyn. It is true she was raised in France, married Will Carey, and was mistress to the King, had a daughter and son, and married a man named William Stafford for love. Most of her life is a gap lost in history. That is why I applaud Gregory for choosing Mary Boleyn as the subject for this novel. It is the extensive liberties she took to tell Mary’s story that bothers this reader.