Elizabeth Woodville is a woman of extraordinary beauty and ambition. Her mother is Jacquetta, also known as the mystical lady of the rivers, and she is even more determined to bring power and wealth to the family line. While riding in the woods one day, Elizabeth captures the attentions of the newly crowned King Edward IV and, despite her common upbringing, marries him in secret.
When she is raised up to be his queen, the English court is outraged, but Elizabeth rises to the demands of her exalted position and fights for her family's dominance. Yet despite her best efforts, and even with the help of her mother's powers, her two sons become pawns in a famous unsolved mystery that has confounded historians for centuries: the lost princes in the Tower of London.
In this dazzling account of the deadly Wars of the Roses, brother turns on brother to win the ultimate prize: the throne of England.
I have kinda fallen out of love with Philippa Gregory. I really got into her back when The Other Boleyn Girl came out in the first year or two when I was working at Coles, and I can really credit her with my love of historical fiction, but now that I'm more of a book snob about it, she's really not that great. She's OK, but once you have read better Historical Fiction, like Alison Weir, it's tough to go back.
As much as she credits herself with being historically accurate, and showing that she's done her research with the long list of works cited at the back of her books, Gregory still REALLY romanticizes her stories and is a little loose with facts about how people lived in this era. Just little things about day to day life, for example how it would generally be months on end between baths. There is this one big romantic scene where Edward gets Elizabeth to let her hair out of her headress and it's all shiny and beautiful and it tumbles out of her headdress, and I am reading this thinking "UM, NO! The whole reason for headdresses was because their hair got DISGUSTING from never getting cleaned, due to the lack of available clean water and the expense of heating said water. So there is a good chance it probably full of lice and smelled. There was NO way it would send him into a lustful frenzy". BUT, Gregory loves to romanticize her novels.
It does bother me slightly that she romanticizes the era, but I have to admit that I probably wouldn't like this novel as much if it wasn't. The thing about the Plantagenet Era is that it wasn't all that easy to live in. As many eras previous to our own, without the medical developments informing us of the importance of living cleanly, and without technological advances to make it possible to do so, life would kinda suck. These stories are primarily written about the richest of the rich because their lives, in a way, would seem slightly livable to people today. However if you were a peasant or a serf the life expectancy wouldn't be that long and life was TOUGH. You would basically be working your ass off, popping out kids to help with the farm, barely getting by, and then dying in your 30s. So, Gregory sticks to the affluent classes, adds in the little bits of romanticism, skims over the more negative aspects of life in the era, and voila! Escapism at it's finest.
There is something to be said for her choice of strong women during these times though. She chooses to tell the stories of the women that were the exceptions. For the most part women were sold (many would call it marrying them off with a dowry, whatever) to advance their families, but Elizabeth Woodville is an example of a woman, that came from a decent family and made her own path to royalty. So, good for her.
In conclusion, this novel was OK. Nothing spectacular in the historical fiction genre. Nothing particularly notable about it aside from a bit of theorized "goddess" lineage of the Woodvilles that made it a bit fun. I bought this as an ebook when it was onsale for $2, and it was worth that, I would say, and it is an interesting part of English History, but I don't think I will read the rest in the series unless I can get them for a comparable price. It's a fun read, but don't expect a Nobel prize for literature on this one.
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