I started my work in the Tudor period with the story of an almost unknown woman, Mary Boleyn, sister to the more famous Anne, and the title posed the question as to which was the most important Boleyn and which was the other—The Other Boleyn Girl. This inspired an interrogation of their history, and indeed the history of women, the relatively unknown beside the celebrated and controversial.
This new novel also has a famous sister, one of the most famous Tudor women, Lady Jane Grey—condemned for her father’s persistent and unsuccessful treason against Mary I—who chose to die rather than recant her faith. Her sisters are hardly mentioned in the general histories of the period but they were unlucky, in that their elder sister defied the religion of the Catholic Tudor, without earning them the favor of her Protestant heir. Katherine Grey’s story is an account of a woman inside the Tudor family but outside Tudor favor. Her younger sister, Mary Grey, is almost unknown but I think she is of great interest—a Little Person, said to be under four feet high, she does not even appear in the specialist histories of little people. She was a woman of persistent courage, showing a powerful instinct to survive where her sisters did not; and while this novel narrates her life as a fiction, her marriage and the dates and places of her confinement are historically accurate, as is her survival and her defiant red petticoat!
The names given to reformers of religion vary throughout this period, and carry very different meanings now, so I have referred to them all with the later catch-all name of Protestants and Reformers, for the ease of the general reader—I hope theologians will forgive me. Quotations from original letters and poems are shown in italics.
The other element in this book that reminds me of The Other Boleyn Girl is the theme of sisters. I seem to have written about sisters in many of my books—the bond is a significant one for women who are born with few natural allies in a hard world, and it is a powerful concept for a feminist: we should all be sisters. So this is the book I dedicate to my own sister, with love.