Abstract
Katherine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII, was a prominent figure of the English Reformation. As Queen, she used her power to bring about lasting change in England. She published her work under her own name, influenced the future Elizabeth I regarding female leadership, and promoted the reading of the Bible in vernacular English. Her story, however, is rarely depicted in popular culture. Two well-known female authors have nevertheless related Parr’s life in biofictions which reflect their respective time periods in a number of ways. Jean Plaidy’s The Sixth Wife (1953) is a historical romance which aims at criticising normative gender expectations in the 1950s. Philippa Gregory’s The Taming of the Queen (2015) is a novel whose main character is a strong feminist figure and resonates with women’s goals in a postfeminist era. The two biofictions, written half a century apart but focusing on the same historical Tudor figure, reflect the evolution of feminism and gender equality from the mid-twentieth to the early twenty-first century. The chapter examines how these two portraits of Katherine Parr are anchored in the feminist movements of their respective epochs.
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Notes
- 1.
Christine de Pisan (1364–c. 1430) is best remembered for defending women in The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies, while Margaret of Navarre was an author and a patron of humanists and reformers. She wrote The Heptameron and Mirror of the Sinful Soul.
- 2.
For ease of reading, Katherine Parr’s name will always be spelt thus.
- 3.
David Starkey, Six Wives, the Queens of Henry VIII (London: Vintage, 2004), 742.
- 4.
Hibbert published under eight different pennames, including Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, Ellalice Tate, and Philippa Carr. The use of different pennames served its purpose in the marketing of her novels: readers came to expect a particular “brand” or genre of novel according to the name under which it was published.
- 5.
Sahara Rós Ívarsdóttir, “The Most Happy Feminist Witch,” On The Tudor Trail, March 3, 2019, https://onthetudortrail.com/Blog/2019/03/04/the-most-happy-feminist-witch/.
- 6.
For a discussion of biofiction’s intersection with specific segments of historical fiction, see also Julia Novak, “Nell Gwyn in Contemporary Romance Novels: Biography and the Dictates of ‘Genre Literature,’” Contemporary Women’s Writing 8, no. 3 (November 2014): 373–90.
- 7.
Alexandra Black et al., Feminism Is … (London: DK Publishing, 2019), Kindle.
- 8.
Jenna Elizabeth Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature” (PhD diss., Stellenbosch University, 2014), 69.
- 9.
Richard Dalby, “All About Jean Plaidy,” Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert “Queen of Romantic Suspense,” 1993, https://jeanplaidy.tripod.com/id17.htm.
- 10.
Susan Higginbotham, “The Queen of Historical Fiction,” Solander, aHistorical Novel Society, November 2007, reprinted by permission on the BBC website, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00x3jfz.
- 11.
Sue Bruley, Women in Britain Since 1900 (New York: Macmillan, 1999), 59.
- 12.
Ibid., 79.
- 13.
Stephanie Spencer, Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 26.
- 14.
Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (London: Tavistock, 1977), 7, quoted in Spencer, Gender, Work and Education, 26.
- 15.
Jean Plaidy, The Sixth Wife (London: Arrow, 1953/2006), 14–15.
- 16.
Ibid., 70.
- 17.
Ibid., 58.
- 18.
Ibid., 233.
- 19.
Ibid., 61.
- 20.
Ibid., 134.
- 21.
Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 68.
- 22.
Diana Wallace, The Women’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 137.
- 23.
Plaidy, The Sixth Wife, 347.
- 24.
Spencer, Gender, Work and Education, 24.
- 25.
Ibid., 47.
- 26.
Plaidy, The Sixth Wife, 5–6.
- 27.
Ibid., 73.
- 28.
Ibid., 180.
- 29.
It must be noted that the ideal of feminine domesticity promoted in the 1950s obfuscates the large number of women in the British work force in that decade; see, for example, Helen McCarthy, “Social Science and Married Women’s Employment in Post-War Britain,” Past & Present 233, no. 1 (November 2016): 269–305, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtw035.
- 30.
Spencer, Gender, Work and Education, 26.
- 31.
Plaidy, The Sixth Wife, 178.
- 32.
Spencer, Gender, Work and Education, 7.
- 33.
Ruth Watts, “Review of Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s,” Reviews in History, no. 689 (October 2008): https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/689.
- 34.
Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (London: Vintage, 2007), 515.
- 35.
Ibid., 519.
- 36.
Weir, Six Wives, 519; Starkey, Six Queens, 761; Linda Porter, Katherine the Queen (London: Pan Macmillan, 2010), 256.
- 37.
Plaidy, The Sixth Wife, 152.
- 38.
Ibid., 116.
- 39.
Jean Plaidy’s Tudor novels fall within the categories of historical romances in bookstores and online.
- 40.
Bruce Lambert, “Eleanor Hibbert, Novelist Known as Victoria Holt and Jean Plaidy,” The New York Times, January 21, 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/21/books/eleanor-hibbert-novelist-known-as-victoria-holt-and-jean-plaidy.html.
- 41.
Wallace, Women’s Historical Novel, 137.
- 42.
Bruley, Women in Britain Since 1900, 149.
- 43.
Jane Spencer, “Afterword: Feminist Waves,” in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, ed. Stacy Gilis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 301.
- 44.
Laura Brunell, “Feminism,” Encyclopædia Britannica, February 8, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/topic/feminism/The-third-wave-of-feminism.
- 45.
Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1999 (London: Macmillan, 2000), 312.
- 46.
Ellie Walker-Arnott, “White Queen Author Philippa Gregory: I Didn’t Set Out to Be a Feminist Writer,” Radio Times, August 13, 2015, https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-08-13/white-queen-author-philippa-gregory-i-didnt-set-out-to-be-a-feminist-writer/.
- 47.
Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin, and Michael Jones, Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 4.
- 48.
Ibid., 5.
- 49.
Maddy Costa, “The Taming of the Shrew: ‘This Is Not a Woman Being Crushed,’” The Guardian, January 17, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/jan/17/taming-of-the-shrew-rsc.
- 50.
Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen (London: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 376.
- 51.
Ibid., 429.
- 52.
Philippa Gregory, “Philippa Gregory Introduces The Taming of the Queen,” Simon and Schuster Books, YouTube video, July 29, 2015, 3:10, https://youtu.be/_KwBIgYlQ3M.
- 53.
Philippa Gregory, “Philippa Gregory on Feminism,” interview by George Stroumboulopoulos, Strombo, YouTube video, December 6, 2011, 1:42, https://youtu.be/930DFyonVDQ.
- 54.
Alison Weir, Henry VIII, King and Court (London: Vintage, 2008), 468.
- 55.
Gregory, The Taming of the Queen, 104.
- 56.
Ibid., 99.
- 57.
Gregory, “Introduces The Taming of the Queen.”
- 58.
Janel Mueller, Introduction and Commentaries, in Katherine Parr, Complete Works and Correspondence, ed. Janel Mueller (Chicago University Press, London, 2011), 31.
- 59.
Gregory, The Taming of the Queen, 190.
- 60.
Walker-Arnott, “White Queen.”
- 61.
Porter, Katherine, the Queen, 199.
- 62.
Gregory, The Taming of the Queen, 146.
- 63.
Ibid., 150.
- 64.
Ibid., 90.
- 65.
Ibid., 148.
- 66.
Ibid., 383.
- 67.
Ibid., 380.
- 68.
Ibid., 371.
- 69.
Rós Ívarsdóttir, “The Most Happy Feminist Witch.”
- 70.
Gregory, The Taming of the Queen, 341.
- 71.
Wallace, The Women’s Historical Novel, 149.
- 72.
Barlow, Women’s Historical Fiction “After” Feminism, 72.
- 73.
Victoria Kennedy, “Feminist Historical Re-Visioning or ‘Good Mills and Boon’?: Gender, Genre, and Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl,” Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought 5, no. 1 (2016): 48.
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Gorlier, A. (2022). Jean Plaidy and Philippa Gregory Fighting for Gender Equality Through Katherine Parr’s Narrative. In: Novak, J., Ní Dhúill, C. (eds) Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_6
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