The Other Boleyn Girl

I came to this book sideways. I had caught parts of the 2008 film on television, with Scarlett Johansson as Mary and Natalie Portman as Anne, and I assumed I knew the shape of it. One sister replaces the other. A king takes a new wife. Everyone pays. When a friend pressed the novel on me and said the film sands off most of what makes it sharp, I gave in, mostly so I could argue about it over dinner. I did not expect to read past midnight three nights in a row.

The edition I read is the Scribner paperback of Philippa Gregory's novel, 672 pages, first published in 2001. It is listed as book nine in The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels, though Gregory wrote it first, before the rest of the sequence existed. The story is told by Mary Boleyn, the sister history remembers less clearly, which is the whole point of the title. Anne is the Boleyn girl everyone knows. Mary is the other one.

What surprised me early was how little this feels like a romance about a king. It reads more like an account of a family firm, with Thomas Boleyn directing from above, his wife Elizabeth keeping quiet, and his children placed where they will earn the most. Henry VIII drifts through the early chapters like weather, golden and changeable, while the real pressure on Mary comes from her father and her uncle telling her to smile, to stay close, to endure. I kept thinking of it as a story about work disguised in velvet.

Hever and the family business

The novel opens with the Boleyns watching Katherine of Aragon, Henry's first queen, hold a court that still looks solid. Mary is very young, married off to William Carey, a decent court gentleman, and brought to London because her family needs eyes and ears near the throne. Her older sister Anne is still in France, learning polish at the French court, and her brother George is already quick with jokes and hungry for favor. Their uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, hovers behind their father, and between the two men Mary has almost no room to say no to anything.

Gregory is good at the texture of this world. Hever Castle in Kent is damp stone and dogs and muddy courtyards, while Greenwich and Westminster are candle smoke and music and men calculating dowries between dances. Mary learns to ride out with the court, to sit with the queen's ladies, to keep her head down when Cardinal Wolsey passes with his train of clerks. Wolsey runs England for Henry in these years, and the Boleyn men despise him while pretending otherwise. That double manner, courtesy on the surface and knives underneath, becomes the air Mary breathes.

The push toward the king starts almost casually. Henry notices Mary during the court entertainments, a girl with a soft face and a ready laugh, and her family treats the king's glance like a door swinging open. Her father explains, without quite explaining, that she should welcome Henry's attention. Her husband William Carey understands the arrangement and says little, because refusal would ruin him. I found these chapters uncomfortable in a way that felt deliberate. Mary tells herself she loves Henry, and part of her does, since he is handsome and kind when he wants something, but she also knows she was delivered to him.

Mary as the king's girl

For a stretch Mary is the acknowledged royal mistress, and Gregory shows both the shine and the cost of that place. There are gowns and jewels, a lodging near the king's rooms, invitations that once would never have come to a girl from Hever. Henry is affectionate and proud to be seen with her. He calls her his own and makes promises that sound solid in firelight. Mary bears him two children during these years, a daughter named Catherine and a son named Henry Carey, though the novel leaves the exact question of their fatherhood in the soft blur that history itself leaves. Carey honors them. The king smiles on them. Nobody at court says the plain thing aloud.

What I liked here is that Gregory does not let Mary stay dazzled for long. Pregnancy keeps her away from court for months, and each time she returns she finds her seat closer to the edge of the table. The king's eye moves. The queen's ladies whisper. Her mother warns her to hold her temper and her tongue. There is a fine scene where Mary, back at Hever with a new baby and sore breasts, hears that Henry has asked after Anne, newly returned from France, and feels relief mixed with dread. Relief, because the daily performance of pleasing a king is exhausting. Dread, because she knows what her family will ask of her next.

William Carey's death from the sweating sickness lands hard and fast, as those deaths did. One day he is well, the next he is gone, and Mary is a widow with two small children and no protection except the same family that spent her like coin. Her father already has a new plan, and it does not include mourning. Anne is clever and striking where Mary is gentle, and Thomas Boleyn has decided the elder daughter's warmth has carried them as far as it can. Mary is told to help her sister take her place. She agrees, because girls in her position agree, and hates herself a little for the speed of it.

Anne comes home and changes the rules

Anne's return is the jolt the middle of the book needed. Where Mary bent, Anne calculates. She has watched the French court and learned that a mistress is discarded while a wife is crowned, so when Henry turns his full attention on her, she refuses to sleep with him. It is a gamble with terrible stakes, and Gregory lets you feel both the nerve and the coldness in it. Anne teases and withholds. She reads reformist books and talks theology with a king who loves argument. She tells Mary, in private, that the family will rise higher through her than it ever could through a sister who gave herself away too cheaply. The cruelty is casual. That is what makes it sting.

Henry's pursuit of Anne quickly tangles with the matter of his marriage. Katherine of Aragon, dignified and stubborn, has given him a living daughter, Mary Tudor, but no living son, and Henry convinces himself the marriage was cursed from the start because Katherine was once his brother's wife. Wolsey is ordered to get an annulment from the Pope and fails, and his fall is one of the best sustained passages in the novel. One chapter he is feasting kings in his own palace. A few chapters later he is stripped of office and dying on the road north, and the Boleyns step over his memory without breaking stride. Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell circle each other in the background, and George Boleyn climbs with his sister, drunk on proximity to power.

Mary watches much of this from the edges, which is both the strength and the limit of telling the story through her. She carries messages. She dresses Anne for masques. She is sent back to Hever when she is with child or out of favor, then summoned when the family needs another pair of loyal hands. There is a sad rhythm to it. Every time Mary builds a small peace in the country, walking with her children and her old nurse, a letter arrives with the Boleyn seal, and she must pack and ride to London to smile at people who pity her. I started to dread those letters on her behalf.

The long wait for a divorce that never comes fast

Years pass in this section, and Gregory does not hurry them. That patience will test some readers. Henry breaks with Rome, has himself declared head of the English church, and marries Anne in secret before the old marriage is formally ended. Archbishop Cranmer annuls the union with Katherine, who is sent away to cold houses with fewer servants and keeps calling herself queen until she dies. Princess Mary Tudor is declared illegitimate and shut out of her father's sight. Through it all Anne waits, aging in a court that prizes youth, miscarrying once and fearing what each lost pregnancy costs her. Henry's temper, so charming when he was courting, turns blunt and frightening when he is thwarted.

Mary's own life takes its quiet turn here, and it is my favorite thread. At court she meets William Stafford, a plain soldier and servant of the family with no title and no fortune, and he likes her without calculation. Their courtship happens in corners, on rides, in honest talk while everyone else trades secrets. When Mary finds she is carrying his child, she marries him in secret, knowing her father will call it ruin. The scene where Thomas Boleyn learns of the marriage is brutal. He strikes her, cuts her off, and tells her she is dead to the family. Her mother slips her a little money against orders. George laughs it off until he sees Mary will not bend. For the first time in the book, Mary chooses something her family did not arrange, and the relief on the page is real.

The contrast Gregory builds is unsubtle but effective. In London, Anne processes through streets in cloth of gold to her coronation at Westminster, seven months pregnant, while the crowds stay oddly silent. In the country, Mary mends sheets in a borrowed house and eats pottage with a husband who chops his own wood. One sister has the crown and the fear that comes with it. The other has little and sleeps through the night. I knew which life I would have picked, and I also knew, because history tells us, that the crowned sister's triumph had an expiry date.

A crown, a daughter, and a shorter rope

Anne gives birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, in September 1533, and the disappointment at court is open. Henry wanted a prince. A princess will do for now, he says, which fools nobody. Anne recovers her swagger for a while, patronizing reformers and snapping at servants, but the ground shifts under her. She miscarries again. Henry takes other women, including Jane Seymour, who plays the modest contrast to Anne's sharp wit. Cromwell, once the Boleyns' ally against Wolsey, starts building a case against them, collecting whispers from musicians and grooms and a sister-in-law with grievances.

Jane Parker, George's wife, is drawn here as bitter and watchful, and her testimony helps damn them both. The charges brought in May 1536 are adultery, incest with her brother George, and plotting the king's death. Gregory presents them as fabricated, assembled from vanity and malice, and the speed of it all is sickening. One week Anne is quarreling with Henry over a christening gown. Days later she is in the Tower, watching the scaffold go up across the yard, asking for a swordsman from Calais because she fears the axe. George dies on Tower Hill with jokes on his lips. Four other men die with him. Anne follows two days later, dressed carefully, composed in a way that frightens the onlookers more than tears would have.

Mary learns the news in the country and rides to London too late, which is perhaps a mercy. Gregory handles the execution without showiness. There is no last minute pardon, no crowd rushing the scaffold. Mary recovers Anne's small dog, keeps her sister's prayer book, and takes in what money and sense she can salvage for Anne's orphaned daughter Elizabeth, though the child is now the king's charge and beyond her reach. The family firm collapses in a week. Thomas Boleyn retreats to Hever a broken man. Norfolk cuts all ties in public to save himself. I closed this section feeling hollowed out, which I think is the intended effect. All that scheming, all those letters and bribes and arranged smiles, and it ends with two coffins and a silent court moving on to Jane Seymour within days.

What works and what wears thin

The strongest choice Gregory made is the narrator. Mary is not brilliant or commanding, and that is why she sees things clearly. Anne dazzles but never lets you close. Henry charms but never lets you rest. Through Mary's tired eyes, the Tudor court looks less like a romance and more like a household where the servants happen to wear silk. Scenes of confinement read best, women waiting in antechambers, riding between palaces in the rain, nursing babies while men decide the fate of queens in the next room. When Mary notes that power at court belongs to whoever can wait longest without complaining, I believed her, because she had done the waiting herself.

There are faults, and they are worth naming for anyone deciding whether to spend a week with this long book. The middle sags while Henry waits for his annulment, with one banquet and hunting party blurring into the next. Mary can be passive for stretches, carrying messages and fetching shawls while the story happens around her, and I sometimes wanted her to act sooner. Readers who know the period will spot places where Gregory fills gaps with guesswork, especially around the paternity of Mary's children and the exact motives of Anne in the Tower. The dialogue occasionally sounds modern in a way that pulled me out, with characters speaking plainly about ambition in terms that feel closer to an office than a palace.

Still, the book earns its staying power. It gives Anne a believable arc from confident girl to frightened queen without ever asking you to like her throughout. It gives Katherine of Aragon real dignity instead of treating her as an obstacle to be cleared. It gives George Boleyn more soul than the history books usually spare him. Readers who enjoy immersive historical fiction with domestic detail will find plenty here. Readers who want strict accuracy or a fast plot may find the length heavy. I finished it thinking less about kings and more about the Staffords' small house, with its fire lit and its door barred, while the great court glittered itself to pieces a day's ride away.