philippa gregory

July 7, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I’ve Read the Most Books By

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about our most-read authors. This was actually kind of challenging to put together since Goodreads took their “most read authors” feature away, but here are the authors I’m pretty sure I’ve read the most, in descending order.

Charlaine Harris: All of the books of the Southern Vampire Mysteries put her firmly on top of my list.

J.K. Rowling: This feels cringey right now, to be honest. Trans women are women, and her transphobia doesn’t change that fact. Also unchanged is the fact that I’ve read all the Harry Potter books, The Casual Vacancy, and the first two Galbraith books. I do not intend to read her work any further beyond books I’ve already purchased, she doesn’t need any more of my money.

Louise Rennison: The Georgia Nicolson series were great favorites of mine as a teenager. Such silly fun!

Philippa Gregory: I will never quit her Plantangenet/Tudor series, they are entertaining trash and I love them.

Oliver Sacks: He’s the reason I became a psychology major in college! I still have books of his I haven’t read yet, and not all of his books are especially strong if I’m being honest, but I’m going to read all of them anyways.

Nick Hornby: The more of his work I read, the more I find it hit and miss, but there’s warmth and humor even in his lesser efforts that I always appreciate.

Alison Weir: I haven’t responded well to her fiction efforts, but her non-fiction histories are very readable and I highly recommend them.

Jane Austen: I’ve still got one more of hers to read!

George RR Martin: I would like The Winds of Winter now please and thank you!

Phillip Pullman: I extremely loved the three books of His Dark Materials, was only so-so on the first of the Book of Dust series and am hesitant to start the next because of the bad reviews!

April 2, 2020

Book 227: The Kingmaker’s Daughter

“I am fifteen, I have been married and widowed, the daughter-in-law of a Queen of England and then the ward of a royal duke. I have been a pawn for one player after another; but now I am making my own decision and playing my own cards.”

Dates read: April 20-24, 2018

Rating: 7/10

That men and women continue to not be truly equal, in this day and age, is hard to understand. But it’s reality nonetheless. When I get frustrated about it, though, I remind myself that as far as we still have to go, it’s still much much better than where we’ve been. It was only just about 100 years ago that the right to vote in the United States was extended to women. For hundreds of years before that (and still to this day, in some places), women didn’t own property, we were property: bought and sold and traded by the men around us.

The usual way that women are bartered is the grand old institution of marriage. Before it was idealized by Disney movies as the end state of True Love (I mean, who cares what happens after, amirite?), it was more a business transaction than anything else. They might have had sweet gowns, but no one was more vulnerable to being the glue in a new family alliance than the daughters of medieval nobles. Philippa Gregory’s fourth novel in her Cousin’s War series, The Kingmaker’s Daughter, focuses on just this: the way the Earl of Warwick, one-time beloved mentor of York King Edward IV, uses his two daughters, Isabel and Anne, as pawns in his game of power. Though the girls knew every comfort their father’s considerable wealth could bring them, they were ultimately helpless to do anything but marry as they were told.

For Isabel, that meant wedding Edward’s younger brother George, the spoiled favorite always looking for a way to depose his brother. When an attempted rebellion in his favor was quelled, Warwick allied himself with the Lancasters, and married his younger daughter, Anne (whose perspective this book follows) to Edward of Westminster, the only child of the deposed Lancaster King Henry VI. The uprising in support of the old king and then the young prince ultimately failed as well, and Anne was taken in by her sister and brother-in-law while her husband was executed. While Isabel eventually died in childbirth (as was unfortunately common in those days), Anne married her other brother-in-law…the youngest of the York sons, Richard. Richard eventually becomes King Richard III, making Anne the queen of England, as her father had once dreamed…but this triumph was undermined when her son, her only child, died around age 10. Anne’s own death followed not long thereafter.

This is a solid, unspectacular entry in Gregory’s series. She’s helped by the fact that Anne’s life was kind of bonkers, with her father’s shifting alliances, her marriage into a family that she had known as sworn enemies her entire life, her lengthy confinement at her sister’s hand and the escape she had to plot to marry Richard, the fact that she and her sister declared her mother legally dead and imprisoned her so they could seize their inheritance, her struggles to conceive, brief happiness on the throne and then a fade-out, made all the more sad by her husband’s attention to his beautiful young niece, Princess Elizabeth York. Gregory doesn’t give Anne a particularly big or compelling personality (she’s kind of blandly plucky and determined), so it’s fortunate there’s a lot of plot to weave around her. Reading it just made me reflect on how trapped women of that era were in a lot of ways: Anne is constantly put into situations she doesn’t want to be in because the men in her life (her father, her first husband, her brother-in-law, her second husband) decide to do whatever is best for them, and she just kind of has to deal with or plot to undermine them as best she can.

There are some quibbles I had with the way Gregory told her story: I thought the witchy woo-woo stuff with the Woodvilles that I find irritating was a little overdone, though it does track that a woman like Anne would have believed in it. And like I mention above, Anne’s characterization isn’t especially strong despite her position at the center of the story. For the most part, though, the plot trots along briskly and it’s engaging and entertaining. If you’re this far into this series, you’ve probably figured out what you’re going to get from it, and this book neither delights or disappoints. Solid historical fluff read!

One year ago, I was reading: All the President’s Men (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Freedom

Three years ago, I was reading: Innocent Traitor

Four years ago, I was reading: A Great and Terrible Beauty

August 29, 2019

Book 196: The Lady of the Rivers

“Through the night we hear the clatter of hooves down the village street, and occasional shouts. The girl, the woman, and I cower like frightened children together: this is what it is like to live in a country at war. There is nothing of the grace of the joust or even the inspiration of great principles—it is about being a poor woman hearing a detachment of horse thunder down your street and praying they do not stop to hammer on your frail door.”

Dates read: December 15-19, 2017

Rating: 6/10

When people talk about the history of marriage (a subject I find really interesting), they tend to talk about how the idea of marrying for love is relatively recent. Which is mostly true! Most marriages until just the last couple of generations were at least partially arranged by family. This has some advantages (like fostering stronger social connections within communities), as well as some obvious disadvantages (like getting stuck with someone you might not necessarily even like, much less love, for the rest of your life). But the idea that love matches never happened isn’t exactly true, either.

There were two love matches, in fact, that were influential in the English Wars of the Roses. In one, Queen Catherine, widow of King Henry V, married a Welsh commoner and her grandson from that union became King Henry VII. In the other, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, who had been married to King Henry V’s brother briefly before his death, secretly married one of the knights of her deceased husband’s household, Richard Woodville. This productive marriage (they had 14 children, including future Queen Consort Elizabeth) is explored in Philippa Gregory’s third novel in her Cousin’s War series, The Lady of the Rivers. As is relatively common with Gregory’s historical fiction, this book isn’t the first in the series, but does take place first in the timeline, so while it explores much of Jacquetta’s life, it ends where the first book written (The White Queen) begins.

Gregory begins Jacquetta’s story with a meeting between our heroine and Joan of Arc as pre-teens, while Joan is being held by Jacquetta’s uncle. This is used to establish the plot device of Jacquetta’s family’s claim to be descended from water goddess Melusina, and set up Jacquetta’s interest in fortune-telling, primarily through tarot cards. When Jacquetta grows up, she’s married off to much-older John, the Duke of Bedford and brother to the King of England. Gregory paints this marriage as never consummated…the Duke is mostly interested in using Jacquetta to further his interest in alchemy and believes she must remain virginal to do so. They never develop much of a relationship, but she does develop a big old crush on her husband’s chamberlain, a handsome young knight called Richard Woodville. When John dies, she and Richard wed…in secret, at first, because technically Jacquetta needs the Crown’s permission to remarry and knows they’ll never allow the match.

From there, Jacquetta and John join the English Court, under the rule of Henry VI and his high-spirited French bride, Margaret of Anjou. Jacquetta becomes Margaret’s maid of honor and closest friend, and is by her side through most of the events of the early period of the Wars of the Roses…at least, when she’s not having children, because she’s basically constantly pregnant. She tries to protect the Lancastrian Royal Couple from themselves (pious, timid Henry lets powerful-minded nobles run him roughshod and drain the royal treasury, and his lack of marital attentions to his lively wife leads to an affair), only to mostly be unsuccessful. When her husband is captured in battle with the Yorks and has to swear to set down arms against them to be freed, Jacquetta is relieved to leave Court behind and settle down to life as country gentry…until, of course, her oldest daughter Elizabeth comes to the door hand-in-hand with Yorkist King Edward.

Since this book provides much of the backstory for The White Queen, I was afraid it would be just as immersed in the kind of silly mysticalism that’s all over the previous book and made it so hard for me to enjoy it. Happily, though, there’s much less of that in here, and it’s integrated into the plot in a way that feels organic. My biggest issue with The Lady of the Rivers is that Jacquetta herself is a fairly passive character who mostly reacts to the events around her. Margaret of Anjou is the one who drives them, and I kind of wish she’d been the protagonist instead, because she seemed BONKERS in a delightfully dramatic kind of way.

Look, I like Philippa Gregory’s books. I don’t think they’re super high quality, but they’re enjoyable to read and as much as I like to be pretentious about my taste in novels, sometimes something that’s fun and easy doesn’t have to be more than that. But if you’ve read her work before, you know what you’re getting into: high drama and questionable historical sourcing. Sometimes they’re a little better, sometimes they’re a little worse. This falls on the mid-point for me…it’s fine. It’s not amazing, it’s not terrible. I liked reading it and I’d read it again if I do a read-through of the whole Plantagenet-Tudor cycle like I’m planning on one day. I’d recommend it if you like Gregory’s work, but if historical fiction is not your thing, it’s not unmissable by any means.

One year ago, I was reading: Paint It Black

Two years ago, I was reading: The Year of Magical Thinking

Three years ago, I was reading: Inamorata

January 11, 2018

Book 111: The Red Queen

“A parcel- taken from one place to another, handed from one owner to another, unwrapped and bundled up at will- is all that I am. A vessel, for the bearing of sons, for one nobleman or another: it hardly matters who. Nobody sees me for what I am: a young woman of great family with royal connections, a young woman of exceptional piety who deserves- surely to God!- some recognition.”

Dates read: December 15-21, 2016

Rating: 7/10

Sometimes, I think the idea of fate is bonkers. Some other times, I think there’s no other reasonable explanation out there. It’s hard not to look back at the rocky, circuitous path that brought you to a good place and not succumb to the romantic notion that it was somehow destined to be. It lends a sense of purpose to our struggles. Most importantly, perhaps, it absolves us of the responsibility for poor decision-making. If it wasn’t the universe directing me to what was meant to be, then maybe I just picked the wrong thing, and that’s much less satisfying.

In The Red Queen, her second entry in The Cousin’s War series, Philippa Gregory turns her attention to Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII. She begins with Margaret, of the Lancaster family, as a devoutly religious pre-teen. Even at age 10, Margaret prides herself on her “saint’s knees”, red and painful because she spends so much time praying, and longs to enter a religious order. Her own mother, though, has other plans for her. At the age of just 12, she’s married off to Edmund Tudor, who is twice her age, in the hope that she’ll bear an heir for the Lancasters.

She does, having baby Henry at just 13, after a long and painful labor that might have compromised her reproductive system, since she never gave birth again. Her husband is already dead in the Wars of the Roses, and she’s married again, at 14, to Henry Stafford. Her son, though, remained in the custody of his uncle Jasper. This second marriage lasted until she was nearly 30, when her husband died in further Wars of the Roses skirmishes. She married one last time, to Thomas Stanley, whose significant forces eventually helped turn the tides against the Yorks, leading to Henry VII’s ascension to the throne.

For my money, The Red Queen is a much more successful outing than its predecessor, The White Queen, and the difference is based in characterization. While Elizabeth Woodville wasn’t given much of a personality, with Gregory relying on vague witchiness to give her some flair, Beaufort has a will like iron. Denied the religious life she craved, she turns that fanatical devotion to ensuring that her son becomes king. She’s given the occasional moment of doubt and a thwarted long-distance love affair with her brother-in-law Jasper Tudor to keep her from being entirely one-dimensional, but her determination and unwillingness to compromise on her vision of glory for her only child creates a vivid character that anchors the book. Margaret definitely believes in fate. I was initially a little hesitant about this series given the weakness of The White Queen, but this book, although it’s hardly high literature and probably takes significant liberty with the actual record as Gregory tends to do, was an enjoyable read and I’m looking forward to reading the following entries in the series.

Tell me, blog friends…do you believe in fate?

One year ago, I was reading: Americanah

Two years ago, I was reading: Approval Junkie

April 6, 2017

Book 71: The White Queen

“A modest woman looks down in this world, keeps her eyes on her slippers; a supplicant bows low and stretches out a pleading hand. But I stand tall, I am aghast at myself, staring like an ignorant peasant, and find I cannot take my eyes from his, from his smiling mouth, from his gaze, which is burning on my face.”

Dates read: July 19-23, 2016

Rating: 5/10

Can we really ever understand anything without context? I’ve been big into Tudor-era England for years, reading plenty of fiction as well as nonfiction historical accounts centered around Henry the Eighth (and his wives) and Queen Elizabeth I. But until now, I’d read almost nothing about the period immediately preceding it: the Wars of the Roses, with two houses of royal lineage, Lancaster and York, squaring off against each other and fighting for the crown. Philippa Gregory’s Cousin’s War series begins with The White Queen, an account of the life of Elizabeth Woodville, wife of King Edward III.

I rolled my eyes pretty heavily when The White Queen kicked off with the hoary romance trope of instalove. But it redeemed itself from that sin by not dragging out an endless will-they-or-won’t-they in which we’re supposed to believe that two adults with serious responsibilities (he as the king, she as a widowed mother to two small sons) would pine after each other for years based on one encounter. Instead we’re supposed to believe that these same two adults would almost immediately fall in love and decide to marry…according to Gregory’s author’s note, because that’s what they did. That they married in secret while Edward’s advisors were trying to negotiate a marriage to a foreign princess for alliance purposes is a matter of historical fact. But to her credit, Gregory wraps up their “courtship” in a relatively short period of time and their actual marriage (and Elizabeth’s life after his death) make up the bulk of the book.

Although Edward was a prolific adulterer, Gregory doesn’t mine their relationship for drama. Elizabeth is not totally immune from jealousy, but she accepts that her husband is who he is and his philandering is only a minor plot point. The drama comes organically from the situation in which Elizabeth and Edward find themselves: the leaders of a tenuous dynasty, constantly threatened. Elizabeth even gives birth to her first son, also named Edward, in sanctuary (literally spending months living inside the walls of a church) because her husband has been temporarily foisted from the throne. With a background situation like that, she doesn’t need to create problems in their marital relationship for intrigue.

Getting into War of the Roses material does help the Tudor era issues make more sense. Henry’s desperation for a male heir is understandable when you realize that it was only with the marriage of Henry’s father (a Lancaster) to his mother (a York) that there was any sort of sustainable-seeming peace in England after a generation of civil war. Henry was only the second Tudor king and there were men in England with equally persuasive claims to the throne. It wasn’t just his personal desire for a son, it was a very real matter of societal security.

When I read The Creation of Anne Boleyn a while back, one of Bordo’s beefs with Philippa Gregory was that she’d alluded to Anne’s guilt on some of the charges…specifically, that she might have slept with her brother in a desperate attempt to conceive an heir for Henry and save her own head. But it’s not only to Anne that Gregory does this: her Katherine of Aragon is guilty of the charges that she’d consumated her marriage to Henry’s brother Arthur, and in this book, Elizabeth Woodville and her mother are guilty of charges of witchcraft that are levied against them. I almost wonder if this is Gregory’s way of pushing her audience out of their comfort zone a little. It makes us ask ourselves if they’d have “deserved” what they got, even if it were true. Did Anne deserve to die? Did Katherine deserve the cruelty she suffered at the end of her life? Did Elizabeth Woodville deserve to have her crown taken and her sons disinherited (and disappeared)? Even if it were true?

Tell me, blog friends…what period do you wish you had more context about?

One year ago, I was reading: Suspicious Minds

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