WLA Literary Awards Committee

The Banta Award 1987
The Autobiography of Henry VIII
by Margaret George
St. Martin's Press, 1986

The Autobiography of Henry VIII

The 1987 Banta Award BOOK
In a first novel which is massive and opulent, befitting the person of King Henry himself, Madison author Margaret George has recreated in print one of history's most intriguing characters. Beginning with Henry's earliest supposed memory, George tracks the life of the golden boy king who led England out of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance and on to a period of terror and execution. By presenting the story as Henry's journal, discovered after his death by his jester and friend. Will Somers, we are permitted to see 16th century England through the redoubtable Henry's eyes.

The Autobiography of Henry VIII combines the scholarship of the historian with the wit and imagination of a first rate novelist to give us a story that is rife with irony and rich with imagery. We see young Henry on the River Thames, the royal barge carrying him to his lady love, "oars dipping in moon-coated water"; the aging, over-weight Wolsey in his cardinal robes, the red satin emphasizing his rotundity "like wrapping a plump turnip in gleaming ribbon"; the berobed, grim Privy Council "like a row of black crows."

George's pace is even, steady and painful. The fair young regent, proficient in scholarship, sports, and the art of dance; theologian, astronomer, musician, composer, poet, architect, and designer of ships becomes a dissolute, disillusioned, pleasure-seeking hulk of a man after the childbed death of third wife Jane Seymour. Will Somers tells us, "His beautiful features expanded and swelled until his eyes were like raisins set in a mass of red dough."

In the end we find a lonely, sick man who had "lost the power to hate as well as to love", suffering from regrets ("red hot nails of memory"), blaming himself for wars with Scotland and France, and experiencing terrifying hallucinations: "It was in the very darkest part of the night, when the sun is gone and thinks never to return, that I first saw the monks..." He was haunted by the blood of many executions. A dish of strawberries "gushed red all over my fingers." The ruby ring on Katharine Parr's finger became "a great globule of blood."

In a saga filled with ironies, the most wrenching is that of Henry's concern with producing a male heir. This, to a great extent, of course, was the obsession that changed the face of England. Henry, contending that Elizabeth and Mary were useless, could not have foreseen how much of the time during succeeding centuries Britain would be ruled by women.

The Autobiography of Henry VIII has been on best seller lists, including those of The Times (London), Los Angeles Times, and Waldenbooks. Among foreign countries which have bought publishing rights are Mexico, Sweden, and Holland. The book has received a first prize for fiction from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. George's future work will focus on Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. She is currently engaged in research on the lives of these two women.

(Extracted from article by Faith B. Miracle in Wisconsin Academic Review of Books, vol. 1, September 1987.)

The AUTHOR
Margaret George

Margaret George comes from a Southern background and was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Her early childhood was spent at various overseas posts where her father, a career diplomat, was stationed. These included Taiwan, Israel, and Germany.

At the university (Tufts, B.A.; Stanford, M.A.) she majored in English literature and also studied natural history. She worked as a science writer at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., and as a newswriter for Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.

Alongside this official study and employment was the vocation that never showed up on questionnaires and forms — the writer who, as Stephen King describes it, was 'Scheherazade to herself.' From the age of six or seven she wrote stories and then novels for her own entertainment, although once they were finished she would send them to publishers. The first completed book-length one (150 pages), a novel about the Old West, was sent to Grosset & Dunlap when she was twelve years old. (It also earned her first rejection slip.) Then followed several other novels at approximately five year intervals. The Autobiography of Henry VIII is her first published novel, and it took fifteen years from the first stirrings of the idea to the appearance of the book in stores. It has had astonishing success for a serious historical novel, even appearing for two months on the British bestseller list after its publication there in February 1987, six months after its U.S. debut.

Ms. George has lived in Wisconsin since 1975, when her husband joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison. She has a fourteen year old daughter, pet turtles, and a medieval garden. She credits her Southern background and the King James version of the Bible for her saga-like approach to storytelling and her love of archaic words and sentence structure.

1987 WLA Literary Awards Committee Members

WLA Literary Awards Commitee