Abstract
The immediate posthumous reputation of Anne Boleyn was largely inscribed by men whose religious and political interests shaped their representations of her personality, relationship with Henry VIII, and the causes of her downfall. From the Catholic propaganda of Nicholas Sander to the Protestant hagiography of John Foxe, a vision of Boleyn as either monstrous or saintly emerged. However, as women started to write about the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn, a more complex figure emerged, prefiguring contemporary representations of Anne Boleyn as a proto-feminist figure trapped and preyed upon in a rigidly patriarchal world. This chapter compares a number of accounts of Anne Boleyn’s life by women in the long eighteenth century: Madame d’Aulnoy, Sarah Fielding, and Mary Hays.
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Notes
- 1.
Eustace Chapuys’s diplomatic dispatches have done much to shape the posthumous reputation of Anne Boleyn, given that they are some of the few first-hand accounts of events in the Tudor court of the 1530s. Chapuys was a staunch Catholic and close to Katherine of Aragon and Mary Tudor, and he consistently refers to Boleyn as “the Concubine.” See Lauren Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court: Henry VIII and His Six Wives Through the Writings of the Spanish Ambassador Eustace Chapuys (Stroud: Amberley, 2014).
- 2.
John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011). Available from: http://www.johnfoxe.org [Accessed: 31 July 2017]; Nicholas Sander, The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, edited by D. Lewis (London: 1877).
- 3.
Hilary Mantel, “The BBC Reith Lectures: The Day Is For the Living,” 13 June 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08tcbrp
- 4.
Retha Warnicke provides a valuable summation of Boleyn historiography, from the sixteenth century to quite recent interpretations, in her Wicked Women of Tudor England: Queens, Aristocrats, Commoners (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 15–44. The most commonly consulted biography of Boleyn in recent years has been Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (Malden: Blackwell, 2004). Warnicke’s more recent Elizabeth of York and her Six Daughters-in-Law: Fashioning Tudor Queenship, 1485–1547 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), is also useful in its comparison of the queenship of Anne to those of Henry’s other queens. However, my focus here is on literary representations of Boleyn, which often deviate sharply, and often inexplicably, from the historical consensus.
- 5.
Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen (Boston: Mariner, 2014), 143.
- 6.
John Banks, Vertue Betray’d: or, Anna Bullen (London: R. Wellington, 1715), 62.
- 7.
Karen Lindsey, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 58.
- 8.
Ibid, 58.
- 9.
Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 103.
- 10.
G. W. Bernard considers the nature of Anne’s interest in reform in: G.W. Bernard, “Anne Boleyn’s Religion,” The Historical Journal 36, no. 1 (1993): 1–20.
- 11.
Sarah Fielding, “Wherein Anna Boleyn relates the History of Her Life,” in Henry Fielding, A Journey from This World to the Next, edited by Ian A. Bell and Andrew Varney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 102.
- 12.
Christopher D. Johnson, “History, Fiction, and the Emergence of an Artistic Vision: Sarah Fielding’s Anna Boleyn Narrative,” New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century 6.1 (2009): 29.
- 13.
Fielding, 102.
- 14.
Melvin D. Palmer describes d’Aulnoy as occupying “an important place in the history of French-English prose fiction in the formative years that saw the rise of the modern novel.” Melvin D. Palmer, “Madame d’Aulnoy in England,” Comparative Literature 27.3 (1975), 237.
- 15.
Bordo, 147.
- 16.
Jack Zipes, “The Meaning of Fairy Tale Within the Evolution of Culture,” Marvels & Tales 25.2 (2011), 223.
- 17.
Bessie Blount was married off to Gilbert Tailboys after the dissolution of her affair with the King, and had little further role in the Tudor court. See Elizabeth Norton, Bessie Blount: Mistress to Henry VIII (Stroud: Amberley Press, 2011).
- 18.
D’Aulnoy, Madame. The Novels of Elizabeth, Queen of England, Containing the History of Queen Ann of Bullen. Faithfully Rendered into English by S.H. (London: Mark Pardoe, 1680), 3.
- 19.
D’Aulnoy, 3.
- 20.
Julie Crane, “Whoso list to hunt: The literary fortunes of Anne Boleyn,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, edited by K. Cooper and E. Short (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 84 (76–91).
- 21.
D’Aulnoy, 133.
- 22.
D’Aulnoy, 101–2.
- 23.
D’Aulnoy, 83.
- 24.
D’Aulnoy, 53.
- 25.
D’Aulnoy, 83.
- 26.
D’Aulnoy, 89.
- 27.
D’Aulnoy, 66–7.
- 28.
D’Aulnoy, 91.
- 29.
D’Aulnoy, 88.
- 30.
This representation of Boleyn as constantly preyed upon was probably a deliberate attempt to counteract accusations made at her trial that she possessed inordinate sexual desires. As Lindsey notes, “it is ironic that Henry would choose to believe this, since it had taken him seven years of courtship to get Ann into his bed” (Lindsey, 126).
- 31.
D’Aulnoy, 105–6.
- 32.
D’Aulnoy, 117.
- 33.
D’Aulnoy, 128
- 34.
D’Aulnoy, 133.
- 35.
F. J. Burrows and A. J. Hassall, “Anna Boleyn and the Authenticity of Fielding’s Feminine Narratives,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 21 (1988): 429–45.
- 36.
Johnson, 24.
- 37.
Fielding, 102.
- 38.
Fielding, 103.
- 39.
Fielding, 104.
- 40.
Fielding, 106.
- 41.
Elizabeth Goodhue, “At the Margins of Menippean Dialogue: Sarah Fielding’s “History of Anne Boleyn” and the Muted Female Figures of Lucian’s Satiric Underworld,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 29.2 (2010), 266.
- 42.
Fielding, 111.
- 43.
Fielding, 112.
- 44.
Fielding, 114.
- 45.
Fielding, 112.
- 46.
Fielding, 115.
- 47.
Goodhue, 279.
- 48.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977).
- 49.
Fielding, 110.
- 50.
Fielding, 110.
- 51.
Fielding, 117.
- 52.
Fielding, 117.
- 53.
Anne Boleyn is also featured in Matilda Betham’s Biographical Dictionary of Celebrated Women, published in 1804. However, Betham’s entry on Boleyn is focused on Henry’s attempts to secure a divorce, as well as the circumstances of her downfall, and is less interested in Boleyn herself. Betham does note, however, that Boleyn’s innocence can be seen in “her serenity, and even cheerfulness, while under confinement and sentence of death” (Matilda Betham, Biographical Dictionary of Celebrated Women (London: B. Crosby & Co, 1804), 139).
- 54.
Mary Hays, Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, Of All Ages and Countries. Alphabetically Arranged (London: Richard Phillips, 1803), I.iii. All forthcoming page references to this text are from this edition and are cited by volume and page number.
- 55.
Arianne Chernock, “Gender and Politics of Exceptionalism in the Writing of British Women’s History,” in Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National Perspectives, edited by Pamela S. Nadell and Kate Haulman (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 122.
- 56.
Gina Luria Walker, “Women’s Voices,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of The French Revolution in the 1790s, edited by Pamela Clemit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 157.
- 57.
Hays lists Bayle as one of the primary sources for her biography of Boleyn.
- 58.
Gina Luria Walker, “The invention of Female Biography,” Enlightenment and Dissent 29 (2014), 87 (79–136).
- 59.
Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn, 246–259.
- 60.
Mary Spongberg has argued that Female Biography represents a shift in Hays’s writing and that, “following More, Hays maintained that women’s influence was best used in the domestic rather than the public sphere” (Mary Spongberg, Writing Women’s History Since the Renaissance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 117). However, as Andrew McInnes convincingly argues, “Hays devotes the longest, and most detailed, biographies to women who in no way fit early nineteenth-century ideals of the domestic heroine” (Andrew McInnes, “Feminism in the Footnotes: Wollstonecraft’s Ghost in Mary Hays’ Female Biography,” Life Writing 8.3 (2011), 279).
- 61.
Hays, Female Biography, II.10.
- 62.
Hays, Female Biography, II.10.
- 63.
Hays, Female Biography, II.12.
- 64.
Hays, Female Biography, II.14.
- 65.
Hays, Female Biography, II.13.
- 66.
Greg Walker, “Rethinking the Fall of Anne Boleyn,” The Historical Journal 45.1 (2002), 26 (1–29).
- 67.
Hays, Female Biography, II.21.
- 68.
Mary Hays, Memoirs of queens, illustrious and celebrated (London: T. & J. Allman, 1821), 78. All forthcoming references to this text refer to this edition and are cited by page number.
- 69.
Hays, Memoirs of Queens, 58.
- 70.
Hays, Memoirs of Queens, 86.
- 71.
Miriam L. Wallace, “Writing Lives and Gendering History in Mary Hays’s Female Biography (1803),” in Romantic Autobiography in England, edited by Eugene Stelzig (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 66 (63–78).
- 72.
Hays thus anticipates Victorian biographies of queens written by women, such as those by Agnes Strickland, which Rohan Maitzen argues are “somewhere in the no-man’s land between politics and romance” (Rohan Maitzen, “This Feminine Preserve: Historical Biographies by Victorian Women,” Victorian Studies 38.3 (1995), 373 (371–393)).
- 73.
Hays, Memoirs of Queens, 84.
- 74.
Felicity James, “Writing Female Biography: Mary Hays and the Life Writing of Religious Dissent,” in Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship, edited by Daniel Cook and Amy Culley (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 127 (117–132).
- 75.
Gina Luria Walker, “Pride, Prejudice, Patriarchy: Jane Austen reads Mary Hays,” Fellows’ Lecture, Chawton House Library (2010) https://www.southampton.ac.uk/english/news/2010/03/11_pride_prejudice_patriarchy.page (accessed 8 August 2017).
- 76.
Austen declares of Boleyn that “this amiable Woman was entirely innocent of the Crimes with which she was accused, of which her Beauty, her Elegance, and her Sprightliness were sufficient proofs” (Jane Austen, The History of England, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen: Juvenilia, edited by Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 181).
- 77.
Bordo argues that “where Benger breaks new ground…[is] in her explicit – and surprisingly sophisticated – analysis of the role played by gender expectations in the breakdown of Anne and Henry’s relationship” (Bordo, 151). However, Fielding’s account of these gendered expectations of relationship pre-dates Benger’s work by more than 70 years.
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Russo, S. (2019). Virtue Betray’d: Women Writing Anne Boleyn in the Long Eighteenth Century. In: Paranque, E. (eds) Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22344-1_4
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