(no subject)
Alison Weir, Innocent Traitor: A Novel of Lady Jane Grey (New York: Ballantine, 2006).
Oh, I confess, I occasionally like fluffy reading (though I do too little of it), and the overly dramatic title and the subject matter got me. I suppose I was 'hoping' for something like Norah Lofts' The Concubine on Anne Boleyn. As an aside, I was most pleased to see this is back in print - my mum insisted I read a copy when I was much younger & it was a tattered hardback at that point, original edition I'm sure (her book Queens of England was one of my most loved books of childhood; one essay for each queen of England, with lots of lovely plates of portraits and photographs).
I'm not terribly familiar with Alison Weir, not being a particular fan of popular histories as such, but it's obvious she's pretty prolific. It was obvious from the novel that she had lots of research backing her up, but this made it come off like ... well, like she did lots of research and felt the need to cram lots of detail in. Which made it seem 'authentic' in the (admittedly disputed, when it comes to her main character) factual sense, but falls flat in a fiction setting.
I didn't so much mind the flipping back and forth between view points and characters, but I did mind the tone - everyone sounded as if they were functioning on the same plane of development. Jane Grey at four sounds the same in voice as Jane at 15, who sounds the same as her mother or Mary I or .... Obviously, everyone had their own twist on the situation, their own perspective, but even the most preternaturally talented four year old still doesn't sound exactly like a mature adult. Still, it was reasonably satisfying fluff. I was just left wishing it had been Lofts at the helm ....
Anyways, delving into the more popular side of history recently has made me think - we also had a discussion last week in one seminar on how people are learning history, it's just not the history 'we' as historians think they should be learning. There's a dearth of academic studies on Jane Grey, but certainly the wide variety of popular materials relating to the Tudors ... or whatever popular subject ... points to a rich body of more detailed histories.
Anyways, popular culture, replication - even close copies aren't perfect - and how all of this plays into present-day conceptions of historical events; everyone comes in with an agenda. We must ask ourselves what our agenda is, because any take on truth comes from some angle or another ....
Oh, I confess, I occasionally like fluffy reading (though I do too little of it), and the overly dramatic title and the subject matter got me. I suppose I was 'hoping' for something like Norah Lofts' The Concubine on Anne Boleyn. As an aside, I was most pleased to see this is back in print - my mum insisted I read a copy when I was much younger & it was a tattered hardback at that point, original edition I'm sure (her book Queens of England was one of my most loved books of childhood; one essay for each queen of England, with lots of lovely plates of portraits and photographs).
I'm not terribly familiar with Alison Weir, not being a particular fan of popular histories as such, but it's obvious she's pretty prolific. It was obvious from the novel that she had lots of research backing her up, but this made it come off like ... well, like she did lots of research and felt the need to cram lots of detail in. Which made it seem 'authentic' in the (admittedly disputed, when it comes to her main character) factual sense, but falls flat in a fiction setting.
I didn't so much mind the flipping back and forth between view points and characters, but I did mind the tone - everyone sounded as if they were functioning on the same plane of development. Jane Grey at four sounds the same in voice as Jane at 15, who sounds the same as her mother or Mary I or .... Obviously, everyone had their own twist on the situation, their own perspective, but even the most preternaturally talented four year old still doesn't sound exactly like a mature adult. Still, it was reasonably satisfying fluff. I was just left wishing it had been Lofts at the helm ....
Anyways, delving into the more popular side of history recently has made me think - we also had a discussion last week in one seminar on how people are learning history, it's just not the history 'we' as historians think they should be learning. There's a dearth of academic studies on Jane Grey, but certainly the wide variety of popular materials relating to the Tudors ... or whatever popular subject ... points to a rich body of more detailed histories.
Anyways, popular culture, replication - even close copies aren't perfect - and how all of this plays into present-day conceptions of historical events; everyone comes in with an agenda. We must ask ourselves what our agenda is, because any take on truth comes from some angle or another ....