Exclusive interview with author Alison Weir and a review of her novel focusing on two Katherines: Grey and Plantagenet
Rating: 3 Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“I had long wanted to write about Lady Katherine Grey, whose story is so poignant,” says A Dangerous Inheritance author Alison Weir. “But, I wanted to add a twist to the story. I wanted to include a mystery with a supernatural element. The Tower of London provided inspiration, as Katherine was imprisoned there. Her story called to mind that of the Princes in the Tower, who had probably been murdered there eighty years earlier on the orders of Richard III. I thought about ways to approach that subject, and it occurred to me that there were parallels between Katherine Grey’s story and that of Richard’s bastard daughter, Katherine Plantagenet. Hence my two storylines…the entwined tales of these two tragic girls, each of whom have good reason to need to discover what really happened to the Princes.”
Weir’s historical facts are wonderful. You’ll get caught up in the history of the story.
Katherine Grey and her struggles with the two queens in her life is the more compelling of the two story lines. Every chapter switches back and forth between the two. That can be confusing with two characters bearing the same first name. Although the two Kates lived in different centuries, they are connected through letters and a necklace. Each need to know what happened to the two princes.
Katherine Grey is sister to the ill-fated Jane Grey, beheaded after nine days as queen. Kate Plantagenet is the illegitimate daughter to Richard III. Katherine finds letters about the young princes that died in the tower under suspicious circumstances. And Kate doesn’t want to believe her father could harm her cousins. The letters tie the two together.
“Sir Thomas More, who wrote a controversial book about Richard III, and described how the Princes were suffocated on his orders, probably obtained much of his information from several ladies living in the Minoresses’ convent [the Minories] near the Tower,” says Weir. “Decades later Katherine Grey tries to track these ladies down and find out what they knew. It was amazing to discover, when reading an old book on the Minories, that after the dissolution of the monasteries it had come into the possession of Katherine Grey’s father and that she had lived there for some years of her childhood. That was an exciting coincidence…a tangible link between my characters.”
“I know the Yorkist and Tudor periods very well, but I had not written to any extent on Katherine Grey, so I did have to do some original research on her,” says Weir. “As for Katherine Plantagenet, she is only mentioned in four sources, so her life is a blank canvas. The fate of the Princes was the subject of my book, The Princes in the Tower. I followed that closely for the chapters relating the heroines’ quests to discover their fate.”
She is currently writing a biography of Elizabeth of York, queen of Henry VII and mother of Henry VIII. To be published next year, it is her 20th book. Sixteen of Weir’s books are non-fiction, mostly on kings and queens or women’s histories. Weir’s biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine won the U.K. Good Book Guide award for the best biography of 1999, as voted for by readers in 100 countries.
She plans and leads historical tours (www.alisonweirtours.com). “Next year we’re running ‘Lancaster and York’ and ‘The Six Wives of Henry VIII’,” says Weir. “I do a busy program of events. I’ve had to cut them down from 67 to 69 a year to about 45, as I’m so busy. But I do enjoy them. I love meeting fellow history enthusiasts.”
Wier was born and still lives in London.
A Dangerous Inheritance: A Novel of Tudor Rivals and the Secret of the Tower
by Alison Weir. Hardcover: 544 pages, Publisher: Ballantine Books (October 2, 2012), Language: English. ISBN-13: 978-0345511898.
[adrotate group=”8″]
