STEPHANIE RUSSO: I have thought a lot about queens. I wrote a book about the most infamous English queen, Anne Boleyn, and as somebody who specialises in historical fiction, there is never any shortage of fiction about queens, so queens seem to creep in at the edges of everything I write. Queens are a handy tool, after all, for thinking about the intersection of power, sex and gender.
Thinking about shifts in how queens are represented can tell us a lot about the reception of these periods in the modern world. For instance, Yorgos Lanthimos’s film The Favourite (2018) gave us what I would call ‘Eighteenth-Century Weird’; the perception that the eighteenth century was fundamentally strange, even grotesque. This aesthetic was later taken up in the (fantastic) series The Great (2020-23). Fun fact: both The Favourite and The Great were written by the Australian writer Tony McNamara.
The latest queen film to have caught my attention is Firebrand. Or, at least, the trailer has, since the film has not premiered in Australia yet. The film stars Alicia Vikander as Katherine Parr, the final queen of Henry VIII. In other words, the “survived” part of “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived”. The film is based on Elizabeth Fremantle’s popular 2013 novel Queen’s Gambit.
The trailer stresses Katherine Parr’s religious radicalism and determination to “change” the country. That change is the embrace of Protestantism. While Henry had infamously split from the Roman Catholic Church years earlier so that he could divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, theologically he was still quite Catholic. Katherine Parr, however, was a devotee of religious reform. The trailer is full of shots of Vikander looking steely and determined. The final line sees her ponder “what is the point of being queen if I don’t have the courage of my convictions”.
This vision of Katherine as fiery and determined reflects our contemporary obsession with finding feminist foremothers wherever we can. In the musical Six, Katherine is the queen who inspires the other queens to set aside their differences and find an identity outside their status as “one of six” wives.
Katherine Parr has not always been read in this way. Traditionally, Katherine has been represented as something of a nursemaid: the older, docile woman who cared for Henry as he became ever more incapacitated. Other novels, such as Jean Plaidy’s The Sixth Wife (1953) stress the danger she consistently faced as the wife of a notoriously temperamental and violent man who had already shown a willingness to discard wives violently. Philippa Gregory’s The Taming of the Queen (2015), likewise, stresses the danger and violence of the Katherine/Henry marriage, and particularly the way that Henry seeks to “tame” her through sex. The theme that Plaidy often returned to in her novels was that even the most powerful women—queens—could be abused and captive wives. And Philippa Gregory is notorious for her sexed-up representation of the Tudor court.
There so nothing inherently “wrong” with imagining Katherine Parr’s narrative as a feminist survivor narrative, and it is true that Katherine was a committed Protestant who, somewhat dangerously, committed her religious sentiments into print. However, when we fictionalise the past we imagine the past as we want to imagine it. We want to see stories of fierce, fiery and intelligent women, so that’s what we find there.
Australian Reception Network 
Hi Stephanie, that’s a great post, and I especially like your insight at the end. Do you find that there’s a limited range of ways that we can imagine the past, and especially women’s roles in the past? I’ve been thinking about how traditionally ‘feminine’ behaviours tend to be looked down upon – I think it might have been a Bluesky post by Ika that made me think about it – and how that means that more ‘feminine’ figures get sidelined or even reimagined. Not that Parr wasn’t a strong figure, but she’s not really a protofeminist in any straightforward sense of the word. Thanks again for the post! – Jennifer
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I think you’re right that traditionally “feminine” qualities are de-emphasised or airbrushed out (or we just ignore those female figures). Not quite the same thing, but I was fascinated by the fact that Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play ‘Emilia’ suggests that Emilia Lanier’s religious poetry was only written because that’s what she supposedly “had” to write, when she’d rather write feminist firebrand stuff. Which is a complete misunderstanding of her context, of course, but entirely reflective of our desire to make her into this protofeminist and ignore all the religious stuff.
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Tell me about it. I think Margaret Ezell’s work should be required reading for anyone doing anything with early modern women’s writing!
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