Jean Plaidy and Philippa Gregory Fighting for Gender Equality Through Katherine Parr’s Narrative
2022; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_6
ISSN2730-9193
Autores Tópico(s)Gender, Feminism, and Media
ResumoKatherine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII, was a prominent figure of the English Reformation. As Queen, she used her power to bring about lasting change in England. She published her work under her own name, influenced the future Elizabeth I regarding female leadership, and promoted the reading of the Bible in vernacular English. Her story, however, is rarely depicted in popular culture. Two well-known female authors have nevertheless related Parr's life in biofictions which reflect their respective time periods in a number of ways. Jean Plaidy's The Sixth Wife (1953) is a historical romance which aims at criticising normative gender expectations in the 1950s. Philippa Gregory's The Taming of the Queen (2015) is a novel whose main character is a strong feminist figure and resonates with women's goals in a postfeminist era. The two biofictions, written half a century apart but focusing on the same historical Tudor figure, reflect the evolution of feminism and gender equality from the mid-twentieth to the early twenty-first century. The chapter examines how these two portraits of Katherine Parr are anchored in the feminist movements of their respective epochs.
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