“For men love what they cannot have, and hate what they cannot control.”
The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn is based on a fiction diary that is delivered to Elizabeth by Lady Mathilda Sommerville, who attended Anne Boleyn during her last moments at the Tower of London. A puzzled Elizabeth begins to read the diary where the mother she never knew suddenly begins speaking from beyond the grave. Robin Maxwell’s Anne Boleyn is a clever but helpless girl who is pressured into Henry’s life by her father’s unabated ambition. Henry’s incessant and extravagant wooing is described most passionately and powerfully. The diary is rich with well-known historical details, but hearing them in Anne’s own words tugs at the reader’s heart more than simple words on a page usually do. This novel was an incredibly emotional read. It takes a brilliant writer to arouse such emotion for a woman who died over four hundred years ago, yet the author pulled it off brilliantly. Although the words in the diary are entirely fiction, they can’t be far from what Anne Boleyn was thinking and feeling as England’s mighty King Henry VIII courted and then disgraced her. This book was beautifully written and makes one wonder how England’s greatest monarch, Elizabeth I, really felt about her Mother, Anne Boleyn. In The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn, Anne’s diary serves as a lesson to Elizabeth to never fully surrender to a man as Anne did to King Henry. Many biographers have speculated that Elizabeth’s decision to remain unwed was a result of her mother’s demise. I suppose we will never really know why Elizabeth remained single.
We all know the story of Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I but this took a different turn with the fictional discovery of a personal diary written by Anne throughout her exciting lifetime. I felt that it stayed close enough to the facts while providing an interesting backup of the possible emotions and motivations behind the real story.
