The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory

The Boleyn Inheritance (Plantagenet and Tudor Novels, #10)

by Philippa Gregory

From the bestselling author of `The Other Boleyn Girl’, Philippa Gregory, comes a wonderfully atmospheric evocation of the court of Henry VIII and his final queens.

The year is 1539 and the court of Henry VIII is increasingly fearful at the moods of the ageing sick king. With only a baby in the cradle for an heir, Henry has to take another wife and the dangerous prize of the crown of England is won by Anne of Cleves.

She has her own good reasons for agreeing to marry a man old enough to be her father, in a country where to her both language and habits are foreign. Although fascinated by the glamour of her new surroundings, she senses a trap closing around her. Katherine is confident that she can follow in the steps of her cousin Anne Boleyn to dazzle her way to the throne but her kinswoman Jane Boleyn, haunted by the past, knows that Anne’s path led to Tower Green and to an adulterer’s death.

The story of these three young women, trying to make their own way through the most volatile court in Europe at a time of religious upheaval and political uncertainty, is Philippa Gregory’s most compelling novel yet.

Reviewed by Amber (The Literary Phoenix) on

4 of 5 stars

Share
Where I loved The Constant Princess, it took me a little while to get into The Boleyn Inheritance. Part of my problem with this was the separation of narrative - I was immediately drawn to three different characters, none of whom I found immediately interesting. It was not until about halfway through the book, after Kitty Howard was already on the throne, that I began to care in the least about Anne of Cleves, whose fight to survive entrapped me, and I knew already Kitty's fate (even though I have not thoroughly studied the Tudor dynasty, there was really only one end which Kitty could have met).

Gregory admits that she has taken certain liberties with the narrative of all three women - instead of presenting Anne as "ugly", Kitty as "stupid", and Jane as "evil," she has allowed all three of them speculative, complex backstories. History has a habit of laying out people in the plainest, briefest way imaginable - good historical fiction takes those cold, hard facts and builds the complexity that is a human being around them, and that dance is one whose steps Gregory has mastered.

I think that the flow in this novel was not as masterful as her previous ones, because the first half of the book moved incredibly slowly. I understand that Gregory's aim was to make this story about the "inheritance" and not about the queens themselves, but even them I feel as though those book could have been two. Nonetheless, Gregroy did a fantastic job creating sympathetic characters out of those who have been stereotyped and have little definitive fact known about them. For me, it is the characters that mean the most, and I believe that Gregory did an honor to three women who have had only dishonor shown to them. After all... all the people who know the REAL truth about any of these ladies is long dead....

I give her three stars, only because the first 200 pages were a struggle for me to get through. It's still good historical fiction, but it isn't comparable to some of her other works.

((Cross-posted to my blog: The Literary Phoenix))

Last modified on

Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 27 July, 2015: Finished reading
  • 27 July, 2015: Reviewed