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If the publishing world were to crown its pre-eminent writer of princely, populist historical fiction, the throne would go to British author Philippa Gregory.
Six years ago, Gregory hit the royal mother lode with The Other Boleyn Girl, a look at England's controversial, conniving Anne Boleyn through the eyes of her little-known sister, Mary.
Since then, she has worked her way through monarchs both big -- such as the Virgin Queen herself, Elizabeth I -- and boring, as in a snoozer of a novel about King James.
Now she returns to stellar form with The Boleyn Inheritance, about three women who dealt with Queen Anne's paranoid legacy. Anne was, after all, the second of Henry VIII's six wives but the first he put to death for, ultimately, not providing him with a male heir.
Gregory tackles the tumultuous times following Anne's demise, when a dissatisfied, mercurial Henry hunts for that one elusive woman who will make him happy.
The fashions and substandard hygienic standards of those times aside, Gregory's stories are surprisingly relevant today. At their root, they're about women who are trying to have some control over their lives and find a teeny bit of contentment.
Sadly, only one of her three characters manages to do that.
After Anne loses her head, Henry gains a son, from third wife Jane Seymour, who in turn is replaced, after her death, by fourth wife Anne of Cleves.
Historically, little is known about the low-level German royal, so Gregory is left with a clean canvas upon which she paints a smart, self-possessed and prudent woman who saves herself from a dangerously mad British king. He's obese, with a stinking sore on his leg, yet he finds Anne not pretty enough for his liking. So he casts her aside, pretends they were never wed and calls her his sister. Anne accepts the fiction and ends up, improbably enough, an independent woman with her own land and income.
Fifth wife Catherine Howard, a Lindsay Lohan of her time, wasn't so lucky. She slept around, got caught and paid the price.
By making her women so real, so flawed and so normal -- Catherine has the hots for a man at court and has an affair with him, Anne of Cleves is repulsed by her grotesquely fat husband of a king -- Gregory makes the past come alive.
Sure, it's good to be king. But it's even better to be Gregory, the queen of rollicking royal fiction.
The Boleyn Inheritance
By Philippa Gregory
Touchstone, 528 pp., $25.95
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