The Other Boleyn Girl (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

GREGORY, Philippa. The Other Boleyn Girl. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2015.

Octavo. Full red leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 664 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate pasted to rear endpaper. Originally published London: HarperCollins, 2001.

Philippa Gregory (b. 1954) was born in Nairobi and grew up in Bristol, where she studied English literature before taking her doctorate in eighteenth-century literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has been a professional writer since the 1980s and has produced more than twenty novels, most of them set in the medieval and Tudor periods of English history. She is described by USA Today as the queen of royal fiction, and the description is earned: no living writer has done more to bring the dynastic dramas of English history to a popular readership, or with more consistent commercial success.

The Other Boleyn Girl, published in 2001, is her most widely read novel and the one that established her international reputation. It has sold more than one million copies, been published in more than thirty countries, spent months on the New York Times bestseller list, and been adapted for television — first as a BBC television film in 2003 — and then for the cinema in a 2008 feature directed by Justin Chadwick and produced by Scott Rudin, with Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn, Natalie Portman as Anne, Eric Bana as Henry VIII, and Benedict Cumberbatch in an early role as William Carey.

The novel's conceit is elegantly simple: it tells the story of Anne Boleyn's rise and fall from the perspective of her sister Mary, the Boleyn who came first and who has been almost entirely forgotten by history. Mary Boleyn is a documented historical figure — she was Henry VIII's mistress before Anne attracted his attention — but almost nothing is known of her inner life, and the documentary record of her existence is sparse. Gregory makes her the narrator and gives her a fully realised perspective on events she witnessed from the most intimate possible distance: the court of Henry VIII in the 1520s and 1530s, the Boleyn family's ruthless manipulation of its daughters in the service of political advancement, the king's obsession with Anne, Catherine of Aragon's displacement and humiliation, the birth of the child who would become Elizabeth I, and the machinery of destruction that ultimately consumed both Anne and her brother George on charges of treason and incest.

Gregory has been criticised by historians for departing from the documentary record, and she has always acknowledged the licence she takes — her books include bibliographies and author's notes that distinguish the historical from the invented. What she provides is not history but the imaginative inhabiting of history — a sustained attempt to render the emotional and psychological reality of lives that the records preserve only as actions, dates, and outcomes.

Very good. Some loss to cover gilt; a couple of mild markings along gilt edges. Contents fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000608