Alison Weir's Anna of Kleve - the Princess in the Portrait (#834) is part of the Six Tudor Queens series. Although the book is clearly marked as a novel, I must admit I felt cheated when I read the Author's Notes at the end. Yes, I knew it was fiction, but I didn't expect it to be fantasy!
Spoiler alert here! The fantastical aspect of this novel is that Anna of Kleve, the fourth wife of King Henry VIII of England, had not one, but two illegitimate children, sired by a bastard cousin. While the author's reasoning of how and why she includes hypothetical pregnancies in the book, based on historical evidence to fit the record is sound. I would have thought of an innocent maiden seduced and abandoned as an interesting premise for the initial pregnancy. No, what upset me was that Ms. Weir says she plucked the putative father's name from Anna's family tree based on the records of the household which traveled from Kleve to England with Anna on her marriage, and from that constructed a mythical true love romance based on nothing but proximity. That was a deception I resented as a reader.
Anna had a hard enough life as it was. It seemed downright mean to impose yet more emotional suffering through a fictional unrequited romance, plus a particularly nasty cancer as the means of her death. It really was a step too far to include a touching death bed scene between Anna and her illegitimate son Johann in which she reveals all!
My advice? If you want to know more about Anne of Cleves, as she is known to the English-speaking world, read a non-fiction biography. You'll get the facts and not the fantasy.
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