In the court of King Henry VIII, a maid seeks the means to survive after Jane Seymour dies
RATING: 4 stars
“For this book I was very fortunate to have access to a six volume collection of letters written by Anne Bassett, her sisters, her mother, her stepfather, and others,” says Between Two Queens author Kate Emerson. “When the stepfather, Lord Lisle, was arrested for treason, all the family documents, including personal letters, were seized as evidence and thus preserved. M. St. Clare Byrne edited and published The Lisle Letters in 1981.”
This is Emerson’s second novel in her Secrets of the Tudor Court series. Nan Bassett becomes the latest maid of honor to Jane Seymour, the heavily pregnant third wife of King Henry VIII. Nan’s hopes and dreams are based on staying in the royal court.
When the Queen dies twelve days after giving birth to Prince Edward, Nan’s life is set adrift. There is treason and scandal involving her family. Can she escape the threat to herself? Maybe she can catch the eye of the king?
“When I was about halfway through writing the book I had an ah-hah! moment that led to an entirely new subplot,” says Emerson. “I don’t start with a very detailed outline so that I can stay open to just this sort of thing.”
“When I’m writing fiction about real people, I require myself to be as accurate as possible,” says Emerson. “But, with most sixteenth-century women, there are large gaps in what was recorded about them. In Anne Bassett’s case, I had made a timeline and was looking at the dates when it suddenly struck me that the length of one of the gaps, about nine months, might just be significant…especially since Anne had reportedly been ill at the start of that period. In light of later events in her life, things that are well documented, the interpretation I came up with is unsubstantiated but not impossible.”
The idea of writing the story of Anne Bassett, heroine of Between Two Queens came out of a brainstorming session with Emerson’s agent in the fall of 2006. “We were both attending the New England Crime Bake, a writers conference jointly sponsored by the New England chapter of the Mystery Writers of America and the New England chapter of Sisters in Crime,” says Emerson. “I write mysteries under another name. We started out tossing around plots for the mystery and paranormal genres and ended up with ideas for a couple of non-mystery historicals.”
Emerson draws strong characters that portray the morals and feel of the times. The character Nan is particularly scandalous and daring. Each chapter starts with a paragraph from an actual letter. If you like reading books in the style of Phillippa Gregory, you will like this book.
Secrets of the Tudor Court: Between Two Queens by Kate Emerson. Trade Paperback, 384 pages, Publisher: Pocket; Original edition (January 5, 2010). Language: English, ISBN: 9781416583271
[adrotate group=”8″]
