Cecily: An epic feminist retelling of the War of the Roses

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But when the King is beset by Gloucester on the one hand promoting all-out war against France and her uncle Cardinal Beaufort arguing for peace, whilst also promoting the interests of his brother's sons over Cecily (his sister's daughter), Richard and Cecily are always going to be on the losing side. I do hope it won't be too long before Annie Garthwaite continues her portrait of this captivating, and often neglected woman, as she faces further triumphs and traumas in the next period of her long and tumultuous life.

But I was actually pleasantly surprised to find out that Garthwaite had chosen to focus solely on the period in Cecily's life before she was raised so high in the world.The Yorkist propaganda that Edward of Lancaster was a bastard is made fact but at least rather than being “evil slutty Margaret has an evil affair”, it’s depicted as something she had to do to survive so Garthwaite gets a lot of points for not using it as another way to denigrate Margaret. The story is very relatable because it covers her younger years, her marriage to Richard, Duke of York, her happy years with him, their children.

The turbulent times are captured well with the ruthless political machinations, greed, treachery and the politics of survival as it becomes dangerous for the couple in the form of the Beauforts and Marguerite. Image: Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland, and her six daughters, from the Neville Book of Hours. I believe the author’s greatest feat was managing to interweave information into the narrative by showing and never telling. The first years of Cecily’s lives are skimmed over and the bulk of the story focuses on her life between the time of Richard Duke of York (RoY)‘s Norman governorship and the aftermath of Towton.I don’t think ‘purple prose’ can be avoided if you want to create an authentic atmosphere (you’ve surely noticed how overblown the literature and even normal speech of that time was in terms of vocabulary and adjectives when compared to ours) - minimalism and crispness wasn’t a thing in at that time.

It is mentioned that they adopt the Mortimer name, but the ramifications of this are never fully explored.Not only was the word choice great at many times (successfully conveying what I’ve been describing above) but the sentence structure was extremely varied and dynamic. As the novel makes clear, a girl's entire fate depended on who was her husband/father/son, and many women fell foul of this. Margaret of Anjou is already incredibly well-established as a malicious figure and antagonist for Cecily, we don’t need this scene to hammer it in. While picturing Cecily in my mind, I could hear her voice and imagine her life-like facial expressions and mannerisms as they were familiar to a 21st century ready… but what I saw was still a medieval woman and not one in a power-suit. It was really really good (although far different from either my style or the style of my favourite novels and not actually my ideal).

I chociaż to fikcja historyczna, wciąż pełna luk i niedomówień, to obiecuję, że zrobi na Was wrażenie i przybliży daleką przeszłość. The only thing that I found challenging is that the first few chapters were full of a lot of names and locations that I could only dimly remember from history at school! Because the pace is so fast, major things like Cade's rebellion are dealt with quickly, and we get no real insight into the rebels, their motivations, or their connections to York.Here we have Cecily as the centrepiece, also Jacquetta who is married to Richard Woodville the first Earl Rivers and Marguerite of Anjou who marries the hapless (or is that hopeless? I’ve seen it avoid prose pitfalls we find in certain histfic classics: slamming the brakes in the plot at certain points to give us meaningless and long-winded vignettes or expositions of certain figures, their feelings (or motivation - yuck! The prose may not be original or rare within modern fiction as a whole (although I wouldn’t know as I only read post-1940 fiction when it’s historical fiction) , but I certainly think it is in TWOTR /medieval fiction. Annie Garthwaite breathes life back to the 1400s Duchess, telling her story from a woman’s point of view, highlighting the important roles women played durig the Middle Ages, which are all but skipped over in history. I’ll say it again - too often authors not particularly well versed in the cultural-literary-artistic side of this era, try their hand at constipated purple prose in an attempt to create atmosphere.