Summer reads-historical fiction

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Summer reads

Past perfect: From a sinister Victorian thriller to the lush life of Louis XIV's mistress, these historical novels will take you back in time.


June 16, 2008 | Salon's staff is recommending summer books that will whisk you to another time and place without making you go through airport security. Previous weeks featured thrillers, chick lit and memoirs.

In this fourth and final installment, we focus on historical novels: a gripping fictional portrait of Queen Elizabeth's early years, when she was still just "Lady Elizabeth"; a Victorian thriller featuring a mysterious housemaid and a gentleman obsessed with anthropometry; a juicy girl's-eye view of Louis XIV's court; and an intellectual romance that spans two centuries, partly set in Venice, where novelist George Eliot is on honeymoon.

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"The Lady Elizabeth" by Alison Weir


Elizabeth Tudor is a puzzle by any conventional standard of femininity, a woman who declared that if she had her druthers, she'd be "a beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married." If she had a great love, or even a great passion, she never got carried away by it, or at least not far enough to let it interfere with the more important (to her) affairs of state. Did her public success hide a private tragedy -- was she, in short, the prototype for Miranda Priestly (from "The Devil Wears Prada") and every other emotionally unfulfilled career woman in popular culture? Or did she, as she proclaimed to her troops at Tilbury, truly harbor "the heart and stomach of a king" within "the body of a weak and feeble woman"?

Alison Weir's novel of Elizabeth's youth, "The Lady Elizabeth," takes the queen at her word. In what appears to be the first installment in a series of historical novels, she depicts the proto-monarch as a girl who learns from a disastrous infatuation at age 14 (with her trifling fool of a stepfather, Thomas Seymour) that love is a treacherous diversion. Furthermore, "her father had desired her mother, and her mother had met a bloody end." Is it any wonder, then, that the princess greets every suggestion of marriage with "a kind of horror"? Since "The Lady Elizabeth" ends with the queen's coronation, and Weir's last sentence lingers over the "warm and twinkling" eyes of Robert Dudley -- regarded by some as the first serious test of Elizabeth's resolve in this department -- perhaps more romance awaits in future volumes.

So, instead of the usual Tudor soap opera of adultery, beheadings and martyred females -- the kind of yarn that has kept Philipa Gregory, author of "The Other Boleyn Girl," in Jaguars for the past few years -- "The Lady Elizabeth" is a relatively sober work detailing the coming of age of a prudent, if brilliant woman. Initially a willful child, Elizabeth goes in and out of favor with her father, half-brother (Edward VI) and half-sister (Mary I), dodging scandals, treasonous conspiracies, religious persecution and efforts to marry her off to assorted inbred Hapsburg hunchbacks and weaklings. By the age of 20, she is cannily explaining to her elders why an unmarried British queen should stay that way: "If she marries a foreign prince, he might interfere too much in the affairs of the realm. Yet if she marries an Englishman, his rule might raise jealousies and factions."

This is, in short, historical fiction not as romance novel but as speculative biography. Still, there are plenty of velvet gowns, jewels and palaces to feed a reader's appetite for vicarious pomp, and where Weir has chosen to embellish on the established facts of Elizabeth's life, she does so for reasons carefully explained in her author's note. She has a firm grasp of the history, though a less certain hand with her dialogue -- I'm pretty sure no 16th century Englishman ever told anyone to "tone it down"; As a result, on the occasions when Weir has a character quote directly from source materials, the sudden shift in tone can be startling. Nevertheless, that she makes a point of using those sources indicates how conscientious she is with her subject. Weir is more historian than novelist (this is only her second work of fiction, the first being the best-selling "Innocent Traitor," about the life of Lady Jane Grey), and "The Lady Elizabeth" is best enjoyed as that: a dramatic, dishy alternative to a traditional biography, as well as the latest attempt to plumb one of history's best-known, yet most enigmatic figures.

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http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/06/16/summer_reads4/