The Privilege of Reading The Privilege of the Sword

[bibliogramma]

The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner

This is a true gem of a book. A sequel to Kushner’s first Riverside novel, Swordspoint, its chief protagonist is Katherine Talbot, niece to the lonely, embittered, decadent, and, some say, mad Alec Campion, Duke Tremontaine. After impoverishing his sister’s family, the Duke has offered to restore their financial security in return for six months of Katherine’s life to be spent living with him as a boy and learning the discipline of the sword. Why? It’s never really clear. Perhaps a whim, perhaps because he believes she wants, or needs, to be saved from growing up to be her mother’s daughter – consider that he has disowned his sister because he believes she acquiesced to her arranged marriage against her true desires.

The heart of the novel is Katherine’s slow evolution from a young girl raised to think of conventional marriage as her primary goal and best chance for a happy future, to a confident and independent woman who can defend herself as a swordswoman of the first rank and will be able to assume the role and life of a Duchess who thinks and acts for herself. Running in counterpoint to Katherine’s maturation is the slow realisation of her closest female friend, Artemesia Fitz-Levi, that she is only a trading piece in the political market, and her self and her needs are irrelevant to her family and society. These themes – of the freedom of defying expectation to be one’s own person and the consequences of allowing one’s self to remain imprisoned – are repeated in many variations, with many characters, like the interweaving melodies and motifs of a symphony.

This is a novel about freedom and acceptance. Of the body, of the mind, of the spirit, of the heart. Its price, and its reward. About finding freedom from social expectations and growing up – or learning, even long past one has grown – to accept one’s own self.