Today I’m posting Q&A with Robert Parry, author of “The Arrow Chest” and “The Virgin and the Crab”. Enjoy!
1) Welcome to Queen Anne Boleyn Website! Could you share with us a little about yourself and your background?
I am an English writer of English historical fiction. My work spans the Tudor, Georgian and Victorian eras – but I like to explore the whole area of dreams and the unconscious as well as the facts and events of history. What people thought and imagined is every bit as important, I feel, as what they actually did – and so I try to convey this aspect of the past as much as possible in my stories.
2) I have finished “The Arrow Chest” and I was impressed with your style of writing and ability of blending histories. How did you get an idea of writing about Anne Boleyn’s story set in Victorian background?
There are already so many novels and films about Anne Boleyn that I wanted to come up with something fresh. And because I wanted to explore the psychological and emotional dynamics between the characters that surrounded her during her tragically short life I decided to loosen up and move the whole story forward into a different era. Victorian Gothic (19th century) is a perfect place to put Henry VIII and Anne because the Victorian age has lots of parallels to that of the Tudor periods. There were powerful men – ‘kings’ in their own right. There were beautiful elegant women, and there were the fabulous poets and painters of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. So it was not difficult to find placements for Anne, Henry and for Thomas Wyatt in that kind of environment. But it was also a suitable match because it was a time which underwent its own very powerful crisis of faith and identity – similar to that experienced at the time of the Reformation of the 16th century. The Victorians had the advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the threat this held for the established Church. The horrors of Anne’s execution and the sinister plots that festered in the background at the time of her fall also fit perfectly into a Gothic setting. The author and reader are then both liberated in a sense to explore and speculate about what might really have taken place, not in a sense of dry facts and events, but on a deeper, more fundamental level of raw emotion.
3) Amos and Daphne are linked to Thomas Wyatt and Anne Boleyn; are they also a combination of other historical figures?
“London, 1876. The painter Amos Roselli is in love with his life-long friend and model, the beautiful Daphne – and she with him – until one day she is discovered by another man, a powerful and wealthy industrialist. What will happen when Daphne realises she has sacrificed her happiness to a loveless marriage? What will happen when the artist realises he has lost his most cherished source of inspiration? And how will they negotiate the ever-increasing frequency of strange and bizarre events that seem to be driving them inexorably towards self-destruction. Here, amid the extravagant Neo-Gothic culture of Victorian England, the iconic poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’ blends with mysterious and ghostly glimpses of Tudor history. Romantic, atmospheric and deeply dark.”
