Questions and Answers

Well, I view them with my‘sensibility’, which is inevitably ‘modern’. Certainly I took a definite stance with the first novel, The Queen of Subtleties, because of who I was writing about. Anne Boleyn was the modern girl of her generation. She was confrontational and out - spoken, and her language so shocking on occasions that ambassadors would flounce offended from her presence.She was notorious, in-yer-face. Well, I’m not going to convey that with the odd ‘Christ’s foot’, am I? And my job as a novelist – my job above everything as a novelist – is to convey a character: I need the reader to really know what Anne was like, to be there, not viewing her down the wrong end of a telescope as someone skipping about in a big dress, having hissy fits. She was far, far more powerful than that.

My argument is this: we don’t know how people spoke in those days.We know how they wrote – or how some of them wrote – but no way is that ever the same as how people speak. For instance, does anyone really think that Tudor people didn’t use contractions? I mean, why do characters in many so-called historical novels tend to say, for example, ‘Do not’ rather than ‘Don’t’? Even if we accept that people did often speak more formally to each other, did they always? I am not claiming that the Tudor nobility spoke as I have them speak in my novels; I’m just saying that we don’t know how they spoke, so I have licence, in my novels, to have them speak as I wish.

Interview with Sarah O'Reilly