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HT reviewer Teja Lele picks her favourite read of 2025
Turncoat or tactician? Resurrecting Jane Boleyn, one of the most misrepresented women in English history
In a year crowded with historical fiction, few novels make a bigger impact than Philippa Gregory’s Boleyn Traitor. Marking her return to the Tudor court after a seven-year pause, Gregory resurrects one of English history’s most misrepresented women: Jane Boleyn. For centuries, Jane has been reduced to a footnote as the treacherous sister-in-law who allegedly helped destroy Anne and George Boleyn. Yet, to Gregory, as to all of us, Jane remains “an enigma, right in the middle of the story, who against all the odds, survives the fall of the Boleyns”.
The novel opens with a glittering masque at Greenwich Palace, where Jane appears in a gold falcon mask that looks “as if a free bird has been cursed into gold by Midas”. The line captures the shimmering danger of Tudor life, dazzling on the surface, deadly underneath. Amid the torchlight and swirling silk, Anne Boleyn lifts her own ornate mask and murmurs, “It’s going to be hard to dance in this… it’s going to be hard to see.” Darkness is already gathering.
Little about the real Jane survives, but Gregory writes her as a woman defined by intellect, instinct, and ambition. Raised by a father influenced by Machiavelli and Castiglione, she becomes a sharp observer, a quiet strategist determined to outthink a court “filled with wolves”. She serves five of Henry VIII’s six queens, weathers banishment and restoration, and repeatedly claws her way back to favour.
Her final chapter is her most dangerous. Accused of abetting Catherine Howard’s affair with Thomas Culpepper, Jane tries to feign madness, a woman’s last shield in Tudor England, only for Henry VIII to rewrite the law so even “a fit of frenzy” cannot save her. Executed at the Tower in 1542, she was then relegated to centuries of misogyny and myth.
Gregory refuses that erasure. She imagines tenderness and affection, even suggesting a maternal loyalty between Jane and Catherine: “We just can’t know what went on between them,” she says, “but there was obviously a degree of loyalty there.” The result is a fierce, complex portrait of a woman, neither villain nor victim, but a survivor in a world intent on destroying her.
After two decades in Tudor history, Gregory calls this the book she has “been wanting to write for ages”.
Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle.
