Tag: Tudor

book round-ups, historical

Platinum Jubilee: Royal-related books…

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As I said yesterday, it’s the Platinum Jubilee holidays here this (long) weekend, so today I thought I’d do a recap of the various royal related books I’ve talked about here over the years. I’m going to try and work my way back in time rather than split this into fiction and non-fiction. We’ll see how that goes…

I took this on Wednesday in my favourite Italian deli when I was buying lunch. It just tickled me!

To start with, I did a post about books featuring the Queen back on the actual anniversary of her accession. Then from the pre Elizabeth II half of the twentieth century we have in non-fiction: Andrew Lownie’s Traitor King about Edward VIII after his abdication, Mary S Lovell’s The Riviera Set which also features the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the background. In fiction there is TP Fielden’s Stealing the Crown mystery set in Buckingham Palace during World War II, the Royal Spyness series of mystery books and Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell books have more than one royal connection across the series so far. Oh and don’t forget my beloved Gone With The Windsors by Laurie Graham – what would Maybell say if I didn’t mention her experiences with Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII?

Back into the nineteenth century now and I have a whole post about books related to Queen Victoria’s Dynasty and there’s more on Hannah Pakula’s An Uncommon Woman about Princess Victoria, Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter and wife of Kaiser here as well. There’s also Greedy Queen about the food that Queen Victoria ate. Daisy Goodwin’s The Fortune Hunter features Empress Sisi of Austria and a cameo from Queen Victoria and John Brown. Pre Queen Victoria there’s a royal connection in Georgette Heyer’s Regency Buck. Honorable mention to the Pink Carnation series, which features Royalist plots, the Napoleonic Empire and Sultans at various points so could rightly be considered Royal Related. In fantasy novels, both Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown and V E Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy are set in alternate universe Regency Londons as is a lot of Gail Carriger’s Parasolverse.

Pre-nineteenth century I’ve written about a lot less royals – here at least, although there are reviews of more over on my Goodreads profile if you can find them. But there’s still Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs (I’m still not past the Napoleonic era), David Starkey’s Elizabeth about Elizabeth I, yesterday’s post about Philippa Gregory’s Tudor novels and some of Shakespeare’s various Kings get a mention in my post about Sir Antony Sher. I really should try and write some more here about of it. After all I was a history student at university and I’ve read a lot on the French Revolution, the French monarchy, and the Stuarts – even if not all of it is royal related. I must pull my socks up and do better in future. I think I’ve got at least half a dozen bits on the to read shelves virtual and physical at the moment that could fit in this post- including more than one about Charles II and about the Bourbon Kings.

I also did a whole post of Royal Romances – which covers a whole bunch of different time periods so I’m putting it on the end, but there’s also Talia Hibbert’s The Princess Trap which is a contemporary romance. I also wanted to mention Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone set in a West Africa inspired magical world which has a heroine fighting the monarchy to return magic to the people.

And if this doesn’t break WordPress’s little brain with all the links back to my own blog, I don’t know what will. Have a great weekend everyone!

historical, series

Series: Philippa Gregory’s Tudor novels

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Today is day two of the bumper bank holiday weekend here in the UK to mark the Platinum Jubilee. I wanted to write a post about a royal related series today to tie in, so I’m going back in history for Philippa Gregory’s historical novels about the Tudor Royals and adjacent families.

Covers of The Constant Princess, The Boleyn Inheritance, The Queen's Fool and The Virgin's Lover

Now this is a complicated series to write about because although they are lumped now together on Philippa Gregory’s website, on Goodreads and on Amazon as the Plantagenet and Tudor novels, they used to be two listed as two distinct series – the Tudor Court and The Cousins’ War. And I agreed with that because the Cousin’s War books have magic in them and the Tudor Court does not which to me suggests that they can’t really be seen as being in the same timeline. And the order that they were written is not at all the chronological order either. The magic issue is also one of the reasons why I haven’t read all of them – after the magic in The White Queen I didn’t fancy doing the others in that part of the series. The other is that as the series has gone on we’ve got into some of the figures where I know it ends badly (as in beheadings) and as we know I’m not always in the mood for that. I’d also not really appreciated exactly how many of them there are now – because I have been ignoring the potentially magic including newer titles…

So really I suppose I’m writing about the first five to be published: The Other Boleyn Girl, the Queen’s Fool, The Virgin’s Lover, the Constant Princess and the Boleyn Inheritance which cover (in the order I’ve given the titles) Anne Boleyn’s rise and fall, the changing fortunes of Henry VIII’s two daughters during the decade from the late 1540s to the late 1550s, Robert Dudley’s time as favourite of Elizabeth I, Catherine of Aragon’s time in England and the fourth and fifth marriages of Henry VIII. From this you can see that they are not exactly chronological – and have now ended up being (again in the order I gave the titles at the start of this paragraph) books 9, 12, 13, 6 and 10 in the amalgamated Plantagnet and Tudor series! There is a sixth book from this phase in Philippa Gregory’s career – The Other Queen, about Bess of Hardwick and Mary, Queen of Scots – which I haven’t read, but writing this post has reminded me that I would like to!

Anyway, I first read the Other Boleyn Girl back when I was at university and borrowed it off my sister in the holidays. I have a vivid memory of buying the Airport Paperback edition of The Virgin’s Lover at Stansted on my way to Tours during my year abroad and can see it now sitting on the bookshelf in my room in halls there. The others were bought either by my sister of me and we shared our copies between us – which probably explains why I don’t have any of them in my house anymore. I reread the Virgin’s Lover a few times during my time in Tours – because I didn’t have many books in English and buying more was expensive – and reread the others too at the time but I haven’t read any of them for a while.

Of course this means I’m not quite sure how they stand up these days, but I remember them as fun historical romps which were accurate enough in terms of the time line of things happening, but took a lot of liberties with what the actual people got up to. If you went to school in Britain, it would be nearly impossible not to know the vague outline of events – because as Greg Jenner says in Ask a Historian we have a national obsession with the Tudors. But even knowing what happens, it’s still a really good read to get there – and the books often focus on side characters whose stories intersects with the Big Figures rather than the figures themselves which means you can still hope for a happy ending (for Mary Boleyn in the Other Boleyn Girl for example) or for comeuppance (for Jane Boleyn for example!) as well as trying to work out where the liberties are being taken with the timeline and historical fact if you’re a history student!

I have two of the later books sitting unread on my kindle because they’ve been Kindle Daily Deals at some point – although I think little sister has read them – and once I get my new library card, I will look at filling in some more of the gaps in the Tudor section of the series without the risk of buying (more?) books with magic in them that I will give up on! You should be able to get hold of any of these very easily – Philippa Gregory is in practically every bookshop, they’re also often in the second hand and charity bookshops and they’re on all the ebook platforms too. They’ve been through several editions – the covers I have in the photo for the post are the current Kindle ones, which are totally different to the ones my old paperbacks had and there are several different styles that I’ve seen in the shops too.

Happy Friday everyone – whether it’s day two of the four day Jubilee weekend or the eve of the Whit weekend or just a normal Friday!

historical, non-fiction

On the Keeper Shelf: History Books

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Another half-term bonus post.  As I was dusting my bookshelves the other day, I was looking at my collection of history books.  I’m a history graduate and have read a lot of history writing over the years.  In fact for portions of my university career I hardly read any fiction because I was so burned out on reading from doing my coursework.  These days my reading is mainly fiction, but a lot of it is historical fiction and when I do read non-fiction, a lot of it is historical biography or about history.  And although I don’t tend to reread nonfiction, there are a few books that I have kept hold of – and not because I worry that people will judge me based on my bookshelves*.  So what have I kept and why?

Elizabeth by David Starkey

This was the big history blockbuster when I was doing A-levels.  And as it happens, I was studying Tudor history.  This was one of the first really readable “proper” history books I had come across (it was much easier going that GR Elton’s Henry VII which I also had to read) and it and John Guy’s Tudor England formed the basis of a lot of my essays at the time.  This is full of research, but wears it lightly – if you want a readble way of fact-checking portrayals of Elizabeth in popular culture (like say the Cate Blanchett Elizabeth films) this will do that for you.  I’ve kept reading Starkey since – particularly on Henry VIII and his wives – and have a couple of others around the house, but it’s Elizabeth that I’m sentimentally attached to.

Bright Young People by DJ Taylor

I have an enduring fascination with the inter-war period.  I love novels – particularly detective novels – written in that period and set in that period and the actual history and reality of that era fascinates me too.  I have a little collection of books about the Roaring Twenties and this is possibly my favourite.  It’s the most Britain-centric – which means I can use it to get the background on some of the people who crop up in the novels and similar.  It’s also got a very thorough bibiliography and further reading list which I always appreciate and there’s a few books on that list that I still want to read.  Also on my shelves (still) are Flappers by Judith Makerell, Anything Goes by Lucy Moore (which is more America-centric), Mad World by Paula Byrne and Queen Bees by Sian Evans.  And I’ve got the new Evelyn Waugh biography on the to-read pile too.

An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick by Hannah Pakula

Now bear with me on this one because it’s slightly odd.  As a child I was a little bit obsessed with Queen Victoria.  Well, quite a lot obsessed.  You know how some children are into dinosaurs or trains?  That was me and Queen Victoria. I could recite dates, I knew the middle names of all her children, I had it marked on my height chart how tall she was so I knew when I was taller than her and when we visited the Isle of Wight, all I wanted to do was visit Osborne.  As an adult this has left me with more knowledge than I care to admit about the genealogy of the royal family, although I did win money by correctly predicting Prince George’s name – and my pick if it had been a girl was Charlotte, so you know, it has some uses.  I was also big into pretend games when I was little – but I always pretended to be Princess Victoria, the Princess Royal, not Queen Victoria.  Yeah. I know.  I was a very strange child.  Still I turned out all right really.  Anyway, there aren’t many proper biographies of Princess Victoria – who was the mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II (him of World War One) and who died less than 8 months after her mother – but I picked this up secondhand at university to get my head around who she actually was – rather than the crazy ideas that 8-year-old Verity had – and although she actually had a sad and tragic life in the end, I keep it on the shelf as a reminder of the weirdly obsessed child that I was.  Also on the shelves as remnants of that childhood obsession are Julia Gelardi’s Born to Rule (about five of Queen Victoria’s Granddaughters), Princesses by Flora Fraser (about George III’s daughters) and Helen Rappaport’s Magnificent Obsession (about Victoria and Albert’s marriage).

 

 

*People are welcome to judge me on my bookshelves – if you look at the big downstairs bookshelf you’ll find Georgette Heyer, Dorothy L Sayers, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Laurie Graham, Maya Angelou, Barbara Pym and Ngaio Marsh amongst others.  I think that’s a pretty accurate picture of me.