skygiants

AND THERE IS MORE COMING. OMG?! OMG!

I think it's kind of funny that Wolf Hall makes you less depressed to be a woman? But maybe that's because Wolf Hall is not about the same kind of power as A Place of Greater Safety, which is about a revolution in the public sphere, so the unfairness that meets women who want to ride cannons and/or make policy is obvious. No women get on any cannons in Wolf Hall (that I remember), so nobody can push them off . . .

I do think the Mantel's portraits of Mary Boleyn, Jane Seymour, and even Anne are incredibly rich. I think one problem the politically aggressive women in APOGS -- Anne Theroigne and Marie-Jeanne Roland -- have is that they often seem very hateful. (There are moments when you get kicked with sympathy, but in general they're hateful. I think.) One doesn't -- or at least I don't -- ever hate Mary, Jane or Anne. They're too much . . . people. It might be because APOGS was the Mantel's first book and some decades have passed since then (as well as many other books); i.e. because she's now a maturer writer.

The tight 3rd person narration obopolsk mentioned might also contribute. The Mantel tends to put her women-can-never-be-happy thoughts in the minds of women (or of Robespierre) -- and Cromwell isn't one. (Not that he's the enemy of women. In fact, I would cite his fairly open, positive orientation towards women as another contributing factor in the comparative less-than-crushingly-depressing picture of women in Wolf Hall.) Example:

I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, inbuilt expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.

-- An Experiment in Love

That said . . . I might not read Eight Months on Ghazzah Street any time soon if I were you.

Um, but my overall thoughts are about the same as yours: APOGS makes me more violently in love, but Wolf Hall is a less violent, though very accomplished book and so I like it in a more muted way.