Anne Boleyn's Imaginary Stepmother (low class and scandalous)

Elizabeth Howard? The Concubine by Norah Lofts published 1963 The Lady in the Tower by Jean Plaidy published 1989 The Lives of the Queens of England by Agnes Strickland published during the 1840s I’ve just been reading a novel about the life of Anne Boleyn: The Concubine by Norah Lofts. I read it after blogfriend Constance/CLM mentioned it in the comments to this post: Childhood reading and intellectual freedom …and I intend to do another post on the book itself this week. But first – something odd arose in the book. It is a work of fiction, and obviously there are imagined conversations, thoughts, and characters (more to come on all this). But I was very struck by the fact that in the book, Anne Boleyn’s mother Elizabeth has died when Anne was a young girl. Her father Thomas has remarried: his new wife is a woman of lower social class. She is warm and helpful to her stepchildren, and in return they love her. Now this was a surprise, because it seems well-attested that Thomas and…