#also in both cases there's an alternate that weir implies they could've had this with in a 'better world'

[fideidefenswhore]

philip making mary happy like she was 10 is a line i remember from her Children of England bio. so "for the first time since she was ten, when her father's eye had first lighted upon anne boleyn, she was truly happy." it's anne's fault again! so i guess weir wrote this novel from reading all her old books again, and not updating it with modern theories. which is kind of like endorsing herself.

also, she says mary had "dreams" about philip, "reliving the delights" iykwim. weird she changed that part.

the boleyn years are actually the only section of the book where weir imagined and wrote out long, extended, creatively reimagined scenes and conversations between characters; pretty much everything else, up till her marriage with philip, reads like a summary of events, either paraphrases or literal verbatim excerpts from her previous works. but, as she herself said in the author's note, the only piece of her life weir sympathizes for was her 'victimization' by anne boleyn; after that she says her sympathy for her is over (an objectively wild thing to say...no sympathy for the execution of her maternal surrogate in 1541? fr?). one gets the sense that the dialogue she gives mary concerning this is 100% what weir wishes she had said to her own father's 'other woman', that she never got the chance to say (tl; dr, revenge fantasy...i still have so many questions about that a/n...her mother was threatened with jail??)

she repeats the line about dreams; ('she was tormented by sensual dreams, in which [they were] making love'), however the actual portrayal of their sex scenes makes it explicit that she doesn't experience orgasm with her husband:

"this time she began to feel, in the core of her body, some tingle of response [...] but he was pressing on heedlessly to his climax and the moment was lost anyway."

and that is...the closest she ever gets.

she does this with her AB novel as well, which i just attributed to her hating her, because she portrays that in such a roundabout way...there's 'no alchemy' between her and henry (of like, all historical couples, this seems like a reach), and the evidence she could've used to support the choice (although, i think it's pretty clear now, especially from this A/N, where she says her own mother = coa, and this other woman in her own past = anne, that it was because she found it gratifying to write about anne suffering and unhappy and lacking pleasure in her life, again...revenge fantasy/transference) she dismisses (the 'vigor nor virtue' quote is a 'lie' from jane boleyn out of spite, anne even has the thought that it's 'not true'...?).