That infamous bawd, Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law Lady Rochford, is getting her day in the sun again after nearly five hundred years. She’s the subject of a new biography by Julia Fox, which was reviewed here April by our own Steve Donoghue and is reviewed in this week’s London Review of Books Storm Cell trailer download A Good Year

The Minus Man dvdrip by the wise and witty Hilary Mantel. The LRB gives its reviewers Open Letters-style legroom, and Mantel takes advantage of it to rehash Lady Rochford’s beans in detail, including wonderful observations like this:

Fox is thorough in her exploration of Jane’s financial position at every stage of her life. It is often the only clue as to her more general fortunes. The figures are there on paper; for the rest, it’s like chasing a ghost. Perhaps its Jane’s very centrality that reduces her to a vanishing dot on the page. She’s always where the action is, if never precisely part of it. No one writes to tell her what’s going on, because she already knows. She sees and hears everything, and keeps no diary.

Mantel comes away from Jane Boleyn slightly nonplussed, as did our own reviewer:

download Blade The difficulty with Fox’s book is this: who is it for? She knows more about Jane Boleyn than anyone else. Her painstaking research would make a handsome academic paper. Her publisher has dressed it up as popular history, and she has provided the padding to go with it; but her credentials as a judicious and restrained historian make her unwilling to set out to entertain, and her uncertainty about who her reader is and what her reader wants make her unwilling to air conflicting theories in the body of the book.

Her review is full of such fluid prose; read it and enjoy it, then click back to April and read some more about the infamous Lady Rochford, who most certainly doesn’t deserve all this high-caliber attention.

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