As the subtitle of Susan Bordo's biography notes, Anne Boleyn is perhaps "England's most notorious queen." She is certainly England's most fictionalized one; even before her execution in 1536, the Boleyn of most written chronicles was a work of fiction, as good or as evil as the writer imagined her. In The Creation of Anne Boleyn, Bordo (Unbearable Weight) explores the various Boleyns of myth and fiction, comparing their stories to the sparse historical record.
The comparison reveals how much of Boleyn's notoriety is constructed--and how little it comports, at times, with the real-life woman. Bordo begins with a review of the historical records of her life and death, taking care to separate what popular imagination holds to be true (Anne had six fingers! She plotted to kill Mary Tudor!) from what the few remaining records can tell us (no and no). Her contrasting reputations as the savior of reformed Christendom or as "the goggle-eyed whore" were undeserved in her own time; over the centuries, they have morphed into Anne as homewrecker, Anne as assassin, Anne as the shadow self.
Next, Bordo explores the development of this character we popularly love to hate, from her nearly mute presence in Shakespeare's Henry VIII to the brainy seductress portrayed by Natalie Dormer in Showtime's The Tudors. The result is a meticulously researched, precisely phrased exploration that exposes the mysteries of Boleyn's life without puncturing their allure. The Anne Bordo gives us is richer, more complex and more human than the Anne of myth and fiction. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket