Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen > Status Update

‘Dormer was clearly aware of Anne’s posthumous reputation and was evidently successful in her attempts to steer The Tudors’ characterisation of Anne away from the femme fatale framework. During the second season of the show, Anne’s intelligence is stressed, and her interest in religious reform is repeatedly emphasised.’

Mention of my Anne Boleyn novel!

‘By the end of the sixteenth century, then, much of the texture of Anne’s afterlife was established. She had been compared to figures from Christ to Jezebel, and from Guinevere to Laura. She was either Protestant martyr, working quietly to spread the cause of reform, or the Concubine, the whore who destroyed Catholicism in England. It is the perpetual trap for women: virgin or whore.’

‘The real Anne Boleyn might be elusive, lost to history and forever unknowable, but the literary Anne Boleyn has much to reveal to us about the still vexed intersection of ideologies of gender, sexuality and power.’

‘This book is the story of those hundreds of iterations of Anne Boleyn. It attempts to account for the myriad literary representations of Anne Boleyn that have appeared across the centuries in order to trace the way that she has become a symbol for a variety of conflicting ideas about women and power. This book takes as its focus literary and screen representations of Anne Boleyn’