The Concubine: A Novel

"Well, it was the first novel I read on Anne Boleyn, in the 1960s, and it’s excellent. It really sums up Anne. It’s so beautifully written that you can forgive the inaccuracies in it. There’s a fictional nurse in it, who gives her poppy juice in difficult times—but that’s one tiny detail. Norah Lofts is my favourite author. I have all 63 of her books. She did a later one called The King’s Pleasure about Katherine of Aragon, which is excellent. But it’s only now that academic historians are starting to lend more credence to Lofts’ work. There have been a couple of theses on her books. But I’ve always admired that mid-twentieth-century type of fiction. I think the books of Norah Lofts were just dismissed as romantic fiction. But that was down to the way the books were marketed. Nowadays publishers try to make historical fiction look as smart as possible, but in those days the jackets could be quite lurid and over-romanticised. This happened to Anya Seton as well and it quite upset her. Years of research went into her books, and they are very authentic for the time in which they are written. I can see why she got fed up with being classified as a romance writer. In America today, historical fiction is still classified as romance . Yes. And at the time of Seton and Lofts, a lot of lightweight historical fiction was being published. The genre became very, very popular in the wake of the film Anne of the Thousand Days and the TV series The Six Wives of Henry VIII in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Once it proliferated, the genre died. It wasn’t actually revived until the publication of The Other Boleyn Girl in 2000. At the moment, there’s still a mania for the Tudors . Even in 2014, when I pitched my six-book series on the wives of Henry VIII, there was a lot of interest from publishers. I thought no one would take six books, but in fact there was competition for it. Katherine Parr, The Sixth Wife came out last year. Then there was a volume of short stories, In the Shadow of Queens: Tales from the Tudor Court . And I have more books still to come out. The Tudor Rose series looks at three generations: Elizabeth of York: The Last White Rose comes out in May; next year will see a book on her son, Henry VIII, and the third, on his daughter Mary, will be published the year after. I have lived with them for many, many years!"