The Sixth Wife – BooksPlease

In my last Sunday Salon post I wrote that I was glad I’d got round to reading The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn and was having difficulty putting it down. However, on reading further on my enthusiasm for this book waned and then crashed down almost to zero. I should know better than to write about a book before I’ve finished reading it. But people often say you can tell if you’re going to like a book after about 50 pages and the first part of this book did grab my attention, so it was all very promising.

My problem with it is that the dialogue is too modern, too colloquial. It’s not that I want ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ and ‘prithree’ this and that, but the conversations in this book come from the 21st century, not the 16th. And although I was fore warned from the description on the back cover that Catherine, the Duchess of Suffolk, Katherine Parr’s “best friend” has her own tale to tell I didn’t expect it to be the main part of the book. The Sixth Wife is not really about Katherine Parr, but about Catherine’s relationship with Thomas Seymour – which Dunn explains in the epilogue is from her own imagination. I don’t expect historical fiction to be a mere recounting of facts, but I do expect it to have some basis in fact, and not be mainly a story of a woman sleeping with her best friend’s husband. This book is more fiction than history and for me it doesn’t compare with, say Phillippa Gregory’s historical fiction for example.

The plus side, however is that reading this book has spurred me on to read more in the period. This list is taken from Wikipedia:

My Lady Suffolk: A Portrait of Catherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk by Evelyn Read (1963) ASIN B000JE85OK
Queen Katherine Parr by Anthony Martienssen, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York 1973
Women, Reform and Community in Early Modern England: Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and Lincolnshire’s Godly Aristocracy, 1519-1580: 19 (Studies in Modern British Religious History) by Melissa Franklin Harkrider
Catherine Parr: Henry VII’s Last Love by Susan James (2008). Gloucestershire: The History Press. ISBN o75244591X

Yesterday I started reading The English by Jeremy Paxman. It’s entertaining but I felt I wanted a story – something to get lost in. So I picked up The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn. I’ve had this book for a long time and I decided it was now time to read it. I’m so glad I did because I have difficulty putting it down. It’s the story of Katherine Parr as told by her friend Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk after the death of Henry VIII, when Katherine had married Thomas Seymour.

Reading one book often leads me on to reading others. I was sure I had a copy of David Starkey’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII but I can’t find it – I wanted to read what he had to say about Katherine, so I must have just borrowed it from the library. I know I’ve read it.

I find this period of English history so fascinating and most of what I know has come from reading novels or books like Starkey’s because we only touched on it at school and my later historical study was all a lot later. I’d like to visit Sudeley Castle where Katherine lived with Thomas – he renovated it in 1547/8. And I’d also like to read more about both Katherine and her friend, Catherine. So much from one book.