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“I don’t really believe in reincarnation but I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by [the
era].
There is nothing obvious in my lineage that would make me drawn to this,” said Maxwell. “I know that my ancestors did come from Eastern Europe and there was somebody with our family name in London.”
Maxwell’s fascination with Anne Boleyn’s story and the historical significance of her
time began after college while she was practicing occupational therapy on the East Coast.
“I was a big reader, like all writer’s are. And what happened was, I fell in love with Anne Boleyn! The way she was portrayed in everything I read. She was treated like a ‘bimbo’ of history. She was ambitious and shrill and she stole Henry away from his wife.”
But Maxwell knew that there had to be more to the story than history was allowing
for. She wanted to know the truth about the woman so many people had come to hate over the years. “My fascination was always there, and I kept reading everything I could get my hands on.”
She aimed to uncover that truth while researching her first novel, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn,
which is told as Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I, discovering and reading her mother’s diary. “What’s the best way of learning the truth? People don’t lie in their diaries,” explained Maxwell.
“Because I had captured a voice that people believed, they thought it was something--that I had tapped into her consciousness.”
After the success of her first novel, Maxwell’s appetite for the truth wouldn’t
subside. In all the literature and research Maxwell has come across on the topic of Anne Boleyn, the portrayals were overwhelmingly negative. “They [historians and authors] took all of the
worst rumors and gossip about Anne Boleyn and took them as fact. It was character assassination, really.”
“Whereas I had found Anne Boleyn as a wonderful woman—she helped found the Protestant
reformation—and a good mother.” Maxwell says she has written the most sympathetic portrait of the unpopular ex-queen. “I wanted to rehabilitate her perception and her name. She’s been
given a raw deal in history, and, of course, history is written by the victors. They smeared her name, and I don’t think she deserved it.”
Her first four novels were all connected to Anne Boleyn in some way, and The Wild Irish masterfully unraveled the relationship between Elizabeth I, Boleyn’s headstrong daughter and Queen of England, and Grace O’Malley, Elizabeth’s rival and Protestant Irish pirate captain.
The story goes that when the two influential women were in their 60s, Grace O’Malley
marched into Greenich Castle making demands to her longtime rival. For reasons unbeknownst to anyone, Queen Elizabeth granted all of the pirate’s demands.
“I wanted to explore why she gave in,” Maxwell explained.
“Elizabeth had stayed within 100 miles of London her whole life; Grace O’Malley owned the biggest fleet of ships and she traveled, was a fisherwoman, had this amazing life. She and her cohorts came quite close to beating the pants off the English. In the end, they didn’t. She is one of my heroes.”
“I like being a little controversial,” said Maxwell, whose books have a religious
undertone because “that was a period where religion and politics were almost one.” The idea that “so little has changed in 500 years” is fascinating to her.
Maxwell’s next novel, Mademoiselle Boleyn, is a coming-of-age story that is meant
as a prequel to her other Anne Boleyn novels. The book will be out in early November of this year. Still in the same genre of historical fiction that has come to be Maxwell’s specialty, but
focusing on new characters and set during the religious renaissance in Italy, is The DaVinci Woman, expected to be released in 2008.
“The characters, even though they’re 500 years old, can be accessible to readers today.
I believe we share the same emotions with these people. Very little has changed emotionally, and that’s what I want to get across to people,” said Maxwell, who strives to make her novels more than just plot. “I like to get into the deeper parts of people’s psyches and souls. Just make them come alive.”
Maxwell, who doesn’t write daily but does countless hours of research and can often
write for 12 hours at a time, gives advice to aspiring authors. “If you have a good idea and you feel the urge to write, you absolutely should write.
Don’t let anything stop you, and just let it take you. So many people do have great stories in them.”
Maxwell lives in Pioneertown, California, with her husband, Yoga Master Max Thomas, who
has an award-winning business at Living Yoga of the Desert in Yucca Valley.
Although Maxwell had always considered herself a “city girl,” and the desert was her “least favorite landscape,” she fell in love with the Pioneertown area more than 20 years ago. “It wasn’t the desert I had always pictured. It was lush, green, and we were in the mountains. Pipes Canyon was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” Maxwell and her husband live there with their two children: Cookie, an Umbrella Cockatoo, and Mr. Grey, an African Grey.
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