Anya Seton: Green Darkness

I first read Anya Seton's novel Green Darkness when I was a teenager, and I haven't had the opportunity to reread it since then. Nonetheless, the story of reincarnated lovers drawn together by their karmic debt to each other, fated by memories from 400 years before their birth to either relive their tragic past lives, or transcend them, struck a deep chord in me, and I've never forgotten that aspect of the book. What I had forgotten, as unbelievable as it is to me now, was that the couple's past lived had been played out against the years of the rapid succession of Tudor monarchs from Edward VI to Mary, and finally to Elizabeth I. So the person I was then was already familiar with the theory of reincarnation, but not yet a Tudor Dynasty fanatic.

Upon rereading, I note that the modern sections of the novel seem a bit forced, with psychiatrist Jiddu Akananda being perhaps too mysterious at the beginning and his explanations too didactic at the end of the book. But the sections set in the past are so lyrically written, so wonderfully rich with detail and so well researched that I have no other quibbles. Indeed, my enjoyment of the book was perhaps greater now than when I first read it, because the supporting cast of characters (many of them, particularly the families of Anthony Browne and his second wife Magdalen Dacre, real people who did most of the things we see them doing in the novel) and the turbulent period of constant religious and political upheaval are so well portrayed, and the story of the fictional lovers Celia de Bohun and Brother Stephen Marsden so delicately woven into what is known about the historical Browne family.

A rediscovered treasure.