Great book

a fascinating insight into Mary boleyn, not the person I had been led to believe, another great book by Alison weir, well worth a listen.

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4 people found this helpful

Great as always

Alison books are always good. We'll written and researched. I guess my only issue, the same issue with many historical books is that much is supposition. Well narrated.

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You'd Be Forgiven For thinking ...

First off, I will say that I absolutely love Alison Weir's incredible work. I have read something like ten of her books and have enjoyed them all. Weir is one of the foremost historians of Tudor history, so it's with a degree of reluctance I must review this book in a less positive light.

What's wrong with it?

Well, the reader will be forgiven for thinking this book is a general history of the period, rather than a biography of Mary Boleyn. There are lengthy swathes of this book where Mary Boleyn's name is not mentioned at all. In fact, other than learning she was the eldest sister and where she was born and grew up as a child, the first two chapters, somewhere a little over two hours into the book, has next to nothing on Mary herself. This is why one might think they had ended up with a generic book on Tudor history with perhaps the merest hint of revolving around the events of the Boleyn family. It's not until we are into chapter three that this biography becomes more focused on Mary herself, and even then, much of it sees Mary as a background reference point for the lengthy discussion on others.

Now, don't get me wrong. It seems to me that Weir was doing her best to pad out the relatively scant details of Mary's life. After all, Mary was a secondary character, if that, in Tudor history and only relevant because of her sister, Anne. It's next to impossible to write a proper biography of a person who was, for the most part, a footnote in Tudor history. The scant source material from which to build her biography automatically made it a task no writer could fill a book of this length with, and I suspect there was a minimum word count imposition from the publishers in Weir's contract for this book. So, it seems to me, Weir had her work cut out to make that word count and to do it she had to write a much more generic narrative here with Mary a mere distant focal point for much of it.

Another attempt to expand this book was the inclusion of lengthy appendix's which, although mildly interesting, traces the descendants and details of their lives of the Carey family for the next two centuries. Not something most biographies do.

A focused biography of Mary Boleyn would've perhaps occupied 10% of the page count here, so those looking for a deep dive into a life untold of Mary Boleyn will be as disappointed as I was. Historians often dig up a hitherto little known rich tapestry of the subject's life, but not so here. There really just isn't enough of what we know of this woman to create a detailed biography.

I commend Weir's efforts here. She has managed to weave Mary Boleyn into a comprehensive narrative, but she plays a tiny part of it in the grand scheme of things. It's not until we reach the final chapters that we get some of the detail of her later life that some readers may be less aware of. Even then, the material is pretty thin on the ground.

Weir has done what she could, but it's not really a biography in the classic sense of the word.

As a generic history book of the period, it's skilfully written and interesting, but not something I could recommend for those wanting to know more about Mary than is already out there.

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Worth reading if you love the Tudor period.

Any additional comments?

Alison Weir has the gift of being able to pack out a book about someone whom actually pretty little information actually exists. She confirms and dispels the assumptions that have been made in historical fiction and explores the Boleyn family and Mary's offspring in detail. It's a book worth listening to.

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6 people found this helpful

Too much irrelevant detail

Too much detail about irrelevant people and not enough real substance. There’s as much information on Wikipedia.
Narrator is annoying using deeper tones for men, but it does not work.

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Very interesting

Considering how little information there is on Mary, Alison has done a pretty good job indeed. It was very nice to get to know more about Mary herself as well as new information on her contemporaries as descendants that I hadn't known before. Maggie, as usual, was excellent

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5 people found this helpful

A biography ‘of our time’

Alison Weir seems to have invested more of her ‘self’ in this book. She writes in the introduction that she had been researching this subject for decades and in places it feels as though she simply needed to unload.
There is far more speculation in this work than in most of her other purely historical writings: I get the impression that she must have tossed a coin this time to decide whether or not to produce her work as a historical novel, and it seems to me that it was an unlucky spin for both author and reader.
There is simply not enough bald fact to bring off her argument, which is, as ever, not quite that her subject may have been a saint or an innocent victim, but that she played a characteristically difficult hand like the independently-minded proto-feminist the author usually finds her subjects to have been.
This rather thin factual gruel is thickened - solidified at times - with screeds of genealogical stuff unlikely to endear the author to a generally admiring and appreciative reader.
Mary Boleyn may not have been a whore, but honestly after staggering through to the bitter end - who cares?

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Good considering the lack of available information

I had hoped for some more certain insist into the life of Mary. This book has a little bit too much speculation for me. But it is a good book read very well.

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Love it

Meticulously researched, Weir has gone to great lengths to describe the “real” Mary and debunked the myth of her notoriety as a “great and notorious whore” with great success.Will definitely try her other books. Narrator was good, I found the accents she put on when reading out quotes a bit tedious though. Overall though, very enjoyable :)

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If you interested in Tudor history this is the book for you

This book is so interesting, well read and full of great information about Mary Boleyn, Least heard of out of the sisters, I really enjoyed learning about Mary’s life and the hardships the Boleyn family went through under Henry’s rule. Excellent book, and must read.

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