The Other Boleyn Girl

• 1. Introduction

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  The Other Boleyn Girl opens in 1521, when a thirteen-year-old girl named Mary Boleyn is handed over to a king. Her father Thomas Boleyn and her uncle Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, have made a calculation: if Mary becomes Henry VIII's mistress, the family gains land, titles, and power. Philippa Gregory's 2001 novel takes that transaction as its starting point and asks what it felt like to be the woman inside it. The book follows Mary from that first unwilling seduction through years of court intrigue, two marriages, a secret elopement, and finally the trial and execution of her own sister. Along the way, it raises questions that kept reviewers divided. How much of this is history, and how much is invention? What does it mean to write a novel about a real woman of whom, as Gregory herself acknowledged, very little is actually known? And what made this particular story, set among the courtiers of Tudor England, resonate so strongly that it was adapted for the screen twice, spawned a sequel, and then a sequel to that sequel?

• 2. The Boleyn Wager

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  Thomas Boleyn and the Duke of Norfolk do not appear in the novel as villains exactly, but their plan is nakedly transactional. Mary is the youngest daughter, already married to a courtier named William Carey, and that cover provides the family with deniability while she sleeps with the king. Henry takes a liking to her almost immediately, and despite her genuine devotion to Queen Catherine of Aragon, Mary falls in love with him. The affair rewards the family exactly as planned: Henry grants them lands and elevated status among the noble families of the royal court. Gregory uses Mary's point of view to show how the court's machinery of advancement grinds individual feeling down into currency. A pregnancy in 1524 produces a daughter Mary names Catherine, presented to the world as William Carey's child. A second pregnancy follows soon after, and this time the family makes a fateful adjustment: they bring Anne back from exile at Hever Castle to keep Henry's attention until the baby is delivered. Anne does more than hold his interest. She redirects it entirely, seducing the king away from Mary in the very hours Mary is giving birth to a son.

• 3. Anne's Long Gamble

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  Anne Boleyn makes her first appearance in the novel at fifteen, fresh from the French court, and Gregory establishes her immediately as her sister's opposite: ambitious, calculating, and willing to play a long game. Where Mary submitted, Anne resists. She refuses Henry sexual favors for years, insisting instead that he set Catherine aside and make her queen. That campaign lasts seven years by the novel's reckoning, during which Anne must continuously renew the king's desire without satisfying it. Her earlier attempt at an independent path had already been crushed: a secret marriage to Henry Percy, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Northumberland, was annulled by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who also, in the novel's sardonic phrasing, "restores" her virginity. Percy had been contracted to marry Mary Talbot, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, and Anne's marriage was an inconvenient interference. The annulment sends her back to Hever as punishment. When she returns to court, she pursues the larger prize. Gregory depicts the annulment of Henry and Catherine's marriage as the pivotal hinge of the story: Catherine's trial turns on Henry's belief that she had consummated a previous marriage to his dead brother Prince Arthur and was therefore never truly his wife. Catherine is banished, and Anne adopts Mary's son to ensure she arrives at the altar holding a male heir.

• 4. Descent and Collapse

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  Anne's position at the height of her power is already eroding before the reader fully registers her ascent. She gives birth to a daughter in 1533, named Elizabeth, and from that point the novel traces a slow unwinding. Miscarriages and stillbirths follow, each one costing her more of Henry's confidence. A jousting injury to the king's leg in 1536 adds political anxiety to domestic tension: while Henry recuperates, Anne grows convinced that public opinion is turning against her and that Henry's attentions have shifted to her lady-in-waiting, Jane Seymour. When Catherine of Aragon dies, Anne allows herself relief, then suffers another stillbirth, and this time the child is deformed, generating whispers of witchcraft or incest. The incest charge centers on George Boleyn, who is portrayed throughout the novel as Anne's closest confidant and, eventually, as someone dangerously intimate with her. Henry places Anne and George under arrest on counts of adultery and incest; Francis Weston, George's lover throughout the novel, is arrested alongside them. Anne presents herself before the Privy Council, which finds her guilty. George and Weston are beheaded. Mary attends Anne's execution still believing the king will commute the sentence to exile in a nunnery. He does not appear, and the sentence stands.

• 5. Mary's Counter-Life

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  Running parallel to Anne's rise and fall is the quieter story Gregory wants the reader to take away: Mary's discovery of a life that belongs to her. After William Carey dies from the sweating sickness, Mary eventually begins a relationship with William Stafford, an Essex landowner of lower rank. The match is socially unacceptable; they marry in secret and Mary only tells her family when pregnancy makes concealment impossible. Anne reacts with open fury, jealous of the pregnancy after her own losses. The contrast Gregory is drawing is explicit: Anne has the crown and is losing everything, while Mary has chosen a man who genuinely loves her and is willing to fight for her children. The novel ends with Mary leaving London the day after the execution, taking her husband and children with her to the country. The son Anne had claimed as her own, named Henry, had been held under Anne's wardship; William Stafford had been willing to help Mary retrieve him. Their daughter together is named Anne, in honor of the queen. The novel began when Mary was thirteen; it ends just days after the execution of her sister, with Mary finally moving in the direction she chose herself.

• 6. Two Adaptations

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  In 2003, the BBC broadcast a ninety-minute television drama based on the novel, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe. The production budget was £750,000, which was relatively modest, and much of the script was improvised using modern camera techniques. Jodhi May played Anne, Natascha McElhone played Mary, Steven Mackintosh played George, Jared Harris played Henry, and Philip Glenister played Stafford. Reviews were mixed. Five years later, Justin Chadwick directed a feature film starring Scarlett Johansson as Mary, Natalie Portman as Anne, Jim Sturgess as George, Eric Bana as Henry, and Eddie Redmayne as Stafford. The production of the 2008 film required screenwriter Peter Morgan to compress Gregory's six-hundred-plus-page novel, and Morgan discussed the problem in a bonus feature on the DVD release. He treated the novel as a broad guideline rather than a blueprint. Gregory reportedly felt the approach captured the essence of her book, even though substantial plot elements were cut or changed. Mary's marriage to Stafford is reduced to a title card before the closing credits. The subplot in which Anne takes custody of Mary's son disappears entirely. Most strikingly, Anne's pregnancy with Elizabeth results from a rape by Henry, and the decision about incest that the novel leaves ambiguous is resolved: Anne and George choose against it. The 2008 film also inverts the character of Elizabeth Boleyn, turning her from a complicit social climber into a figure who tries to protect her daughters from the family's ambitions.

• 7. Reception and the Series

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  Critical reaction to the novel split along two lines that Gregory's historical fiction has always divided readers. Admirers called it brilliantly claustrophobic in its rendering of Tudor palace life. Critics focused on the liberties taken with the historical record, a concern Gregory had acknowledged from the start: the real Mary Boleyn is a figure about whom very little is actually known, and the novel is offered as fiction inspired by her story, not biography. The question of Anne's birth order is one example Gregory flags directly in her character notes: research suggests Anne was actually the younger of the two sisters, which would invert the novel's entire power dynamic. Gregory published a sequel, The Queen's Fool, set during the reign of Henry's daughter Queen Mary. That book was followed by The Virgin's Lover, set in the early days of Queen Elizabeth I's reign, meaning the daughters whose births punctuate The Other Boleyn Girl each became the subject of their own chapter in Gregory's extended Tudor sequence.