In the words of David Starkey,
“The best full-length life of Anne Boleyn and a monument to investigative scholarship.”
Cover of Eric Ives' definitive biography on Anne Boleyn
This is undoubtedly the best Anne Boleyn biography that has ever been written. It is meticulously researched, detailed and accurate. Ives not only introduces the reader to Anne, he breathes life back into her. She emerges from the pages as a woman of great intellect, ambition and passion. A woman who took her life into her own hands when other women of the time were only pawns in a man’s world.
Her education, strength and personality made her influential and powerful in the faction-ridden court of Henry VIII. So powerful in fact that it took a full-fledged coup and a great deal of lies to bring Anne and the entire Boleyn faction crashing down. Anne was not simply a victim of Henry VIII’s disaffection, she took on Cromwell and her enemies and lost.
This book is lively, engaging and informative. It provides us with a lot of detail about Anne and the time in which she lived and in the end leaves you with a person, a portrait of Anne Boleyn the woman, the mother, the Queen.
If you are serious about learning more about Anne’s life then you must read this book. I call it my ‘Anne bible.’
