She never seems to take any initiative in deciding her own fate, instead allowing others to take agency over her future. Jane’s primary character traits are her devotion and her dutifulness. At times, Jane feels like a supporting character in her own narrative. Weir seems to understand this, and a great deal of her novel is focused on Katherine and Anne’s tumultuous and historical battle for control of the King. She lacks the fierce fight and devotion of Katherine of Aragorn, or the wild chaos and manipulative personality of Anne Boleyn. And because Jane is defined by her religious devotion, she makes for a rather nondescript character. She was not well-educated like the two queens who came before her, so we simply don’t know if she had strong opinions on anything other than her Catholic faith.
The letters and documents that mention her all describe her as “devout” and “pious”. I think part of the problem is that of all Henry VII’s wives, Jane Seymour is the least interesting. Reading Jane Seymour felt like an exercise in extreme patience at times, since Weir seems to be striving for a nearly day-by-day record of Jane Seymour’s life during leading up to an including the death of Anne Boleyn. How do you write a six hundred page fictional biography on a woman’s life that is not well documented? Turns out, you add an insane amount of extraneous detail, milk any morsel of archival evidence, and generally drag things out far longer than is necessary. I was surprised, therefore, when I picked this book up from the library to find out that it was nearly six hundred pages long. Not nearly as much is known about the life of Jane Seymour, given that she was married to King Henry for a mere eighteen months.
I’ve read and enjoyed the previous novels, and was interested to see how Weir proceeded after the tumultuous and widely documented reigns of Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. This is the third installment in Weir’s Six Tudor Queens series. Renowned historical biographer Alison Weir writes a fictionalized account of Jane Seymour’s life as seen through her eyes. She died of complications following childbirth at only twenty-eight years old. She was widely praised for her virtue and devout Catholic faith, and clung to her religion even as Henry broke with the Roman Catholic Church. Having served in the court of both Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Jane saw the fall of both women when they failed to deliver an heir for their King. The third wife of King Henry VIII, Jane Seymour was the Queen of England for barely more than a year.
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