My life in books

One of the few novels about Katherine Howard in print is Diane Haegar’s The Queen’s Mistake. Having recently gone on a binge read about some of Henry VIII’s other wives, but never having read anything written about Katherine Howard other than some of the history books that cover all of the wives, I decided to find whatever I could about Katherine and see how at least one author has decided to interpret the known facts.

Most historians seem to agree that, while Katherine was a Howard and thus a member of a powerful family, she herself was not seem as an important or valuable member of that house until Henry VIII began to show his displeasure at being married to Anne of Cleves. Seeing another chance to control the king through his women, the Earl of Norfolk, head of the Howard family, uncle of Henry’s second queen Anne Boleyn, went looking among the various young women of the family in the hopes that they might find someone pretty enough to catch the king’s eye. The prospective mistress, perhaps bribe, he found was Katherine.

Katherine’s father was a younger Howard son among 21 children, and had no inherited wealth or lands. Her mother died when she was five, having borne six children to Katherine’s father and five to a previous husband. The children were parceled out as wards to various relatives; her father remarried and took a position at Calais.

Katherine was given into the care of her father’s stepmother, the Dowager Countess, who had a rather large number of poor relations and young female wards and attendants and seemed rather lax in watching over and educating them. By courtly standards, Katherine was poorly educated. What she had, however, was beauty. And a history to be hidden.

Looked at through modern sensibilities, Katherine was the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her music teacher, Henry Maddox, when she was around 13, and was later seduced at 15 by an older man, Francis Dereham, her guardian’s secretary, with whom she may have entered into a precontract to marry - witnesses at her trial agreed that they called each other husband and wife, and were fully sexually intimate. In Tudor times, a girl of 13 might be seen as old enough to marry, and a girl of 15 would be deemed capable of consent, so these sexual experiences were generally seen as proof of her unchaste character and not manipulation or abuse of a young girl by older men.

She, however insisted that she had not consented to either. Ironically, had she agreed that she had been precontracted to Dereham, she might have lived - that would have rendered her marriage to the king null and void, and made the charge of adultery with Thomas Culpepper irrelevant, at least as far as the king was concerned.

Interpretations of Katherine’s character and behaviour tend to be connected to how her early sexual experiences are viewed. Those who see her as the victim of older men tend to see her as a tragic figure, one who perhaps, as victims of sexual abuse often can be, was too prone to interpret sex as love, and to seek sex inappropriately because that’s what she was used to. Those who blame her for her early experience see her as deceitful, deliberately unfaithful, hedonistic and immoral. We’ll likely never know, as she left very little behind to tell us who she was, beyond her testimony and confession. She was barely 18 when she died.

Diane Haeger has resisted taking the easy way out, of presenting Katherine as all victim or all whore. Instead, she shows us a young girl bereft of love and affection at an early age, who takes what she can get, but doesn’t trust that what she is given is honest. In her own mind, is she seducer or seduced? A bit of both. The men who claim her while she is still a young girl at the Dowager Countess’s estate of Horsham as a mere girl at least give her a sense of being wanted, and with Dereham, to some extent, Haeger has her return his affection. But she doesn’t take his protestations of wanting to marry her seriously, especially once her uncle Norfolk announces his plans to bring her to court. She hopes to reach higher than a mere secretary, a servant - she dreams of attracting the attention of a nobleman. The thought that she might capture the king is not really in her mind. And Haeger proposes the possibility that the liaisons were not just known of, but arranged by the Dowager Countess as part of a plan to turn Katherine into a courtesan, the perfect mistress. It’s an interesting idea, and allows her to present Katherine as a wanton - she gives her sexual favours freely and carelessly once she arrives at court - and still maintain her as essentially a victim. If she was programmed to respond sexually to any man who showed her interest or affection, then it’s arguably not wholly her fault if she did succumb to attention, even love, from Culpepper.

Once it becomes clear to her that the king desires her, poor Katherine is trapped. Her family is pressuring her to acquiesce to his wishes, and the blackmailers - servants from her former life at Horsham who know all about Maddox and Dereham - have begun to demand favours and positions at court. Her uncle Norfolk and the Dowager Countess have both assured the king of her virginity, even though both know of her past, and that she is now having an affair with Culpepper. The only way out now would be to tell the truth, but that would put Culpepper beyond her reach forever. And so the tragedy move inexorably towards its end.

I liked this interpretation of Katherine as a young woman trapped and betrayed by almost everyone who should have taken care of her, from her early days as an orphaned and penniless unwanted relative to the pawn of powerful forces beyond her control - her family’s ambition, the king’s desires, the intrigues over religion that saw poor Katherine not as a girl in above her head, but a possible resurgence for the Catholic faith. She never had a chance, and all she really did wrong was take what comfort she could from perhaps the only person who truly saw her, cared for her, loved her.

I seem to be having another of my Tudor binges. It is my favourite period of English history, and having just recently finished the excellent cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn by Susan Bardo, I find myself looking through my massive TBR list for historical fiction set in the Tudor era. As it turned out, I was in a mood for more of the tempestuous reign of Henry VIII and the ways his wives have been interpreted. There’s a lot out there about Katherine of Aragon, and of course the enigmatic and iconic Anne, buy his other wives have seemed to get less attention - though I’m seeing more about, and have in my TBR pile, a few new histories of, Katherine Parr. Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard, though, don’t appear to be inspiring figures fir historical fiction - especially poor Katherine. I have’t anything that focuses on her in my library, fiction or history. But I do have some treatments of the other three later wives.

My eye first fell on Margaret Campbell Barnes’ My Lady of Cleves, a novel about the often neglected fourth wife of Henry VIII, and really, the only one who managed a good life post-Henry. To be sure, Katherine Parr survived Henry, but came to a sad end not too long afterward, marrying Thomas Seymour, who would engage in a concerted attempt to seduce her step-daughter Elizabeth under her very nose, and leave her to due alone of post-partum fever. Anne of Cleves not only got out alive, but she remained on good terms with her difficult former husband, wrangled a decent financial settlement out of him, and had a comfortable and relatively long life. Without the passion, tragedy and death associated with most of his other queens, Anne’s story of life with Henry is often overlooked. But she’s one of my favourites, because she was a survivor.

Margaret Campbell Barnes gives us a picture of the Princessof Cleves that is both sympathetic and engaging. Her Anne is a woman who loves little things, is kind and generous, but knows herself to be too tall, large-boned and plain of face, much less attractive than her married older sister Sybille, or her younger, pretty Amelia. She is shocked when Hans Holbein paints her as an attractive woman, and surprised when Henry chooses her rather than Amelia to be his wife.

But on meeting her, Henry is not pleased - he calls her a Flemish mare - and though he goes through with the marriage, his eye is already in the pretty little Howard girl newly arrived Court, and his mind on how to get rid of Anne. Perhaps because she is, after all, a foreign princess, perhaps because she has become beloved of the people of London, perhaps because of her motherly care of his three motherless children, he offers her the option of a quite divorce on grounds of non-consummation, and in his guilt, makes a gift of the royal palace of Richmond and a suitable income to maintain it.

In Barnes’ story, Anne flowers after the divorce, finally free to live her life as she desires. She enjoys keeping Richmond House in good condition, managing her household, being a hostess to her neighbours and those who befriended her at fourt, and doing good deeds in the surrounding area. She is allowed to have Edward, Elizabeth and Mary visit her, and she tries to give them the nurturing that all have lacked. In Barnes’ novel, Anne and Hans Holbein develop a mutual attraction that is acknowledged but never consummated, giving Anne a chance to be a romantic of a sort, but never being impractical about it. The world-wise and cynical Holbein is a source of support and information for her, as he explains the secrets and plots at court that threaten her, marvelling at her ability to remain good-hearted and somehow innocent in the midst of political power plays and corruption. Barnes gives Anne the gift of making people feel comfortable with her - over time, people from Mary Tudor to Thomas Cranmer come to see her as a friend and confidante. The overall picture that emerges is of an intelligent, warm, generous woman who deserved a better life - a loving husband, children, a home - but who made the best of the hand she was dealt, and found ways to be happy and to give of herself to others despite being deprived of the things that might have fulfilled her most.

Elizabeth Fremantle’s The Queen’s Gambit, the first novel in her Tudor trilogy, is the story of the sixth and last wife of Henry VIII, Katherine Parr. Fremantle begins Katherine’s story with the death of her second husband, Lord Latimer (or, as she has it, Latymer), giving Katherine a tragic past beyond the fact of having buried two husbands. Lord Latimer had been involved in the northern rebellion, but unlike many other lords who participated, he was simply no longer welcomed at court, rather than executed. Many believe that Latimer gave information to the King’s forces near the end - certainly, there was enough suspicion that some of the rebels captured the Latimer seat at Snape and held Katherine and her step-daughter Margaret Neville prisoner. In Fremantle’s interpretation, both women were raped, and Katherine bore a child who died at birth. There’s no historical record of this, but then, there wouldn’t have been, with the Latimers neither at court nor involved in the social life of the peerage. Fremantle also presents us with a woman who, watching her husband slowly die in agony, and being skilled in the use of herbs, is persuaded by him to hasten his passing - a mortal sin in those times. While unprovable, these additions certainly give Katherine a traumatic but interesting backstory.

Fremantle uses two very different women as viewpoint characters, Katherine herself, and the young servant Dot, who was with Katherine and Margaret during their captivity at Snape, and who is Margaret’s devoted companion. It’s a clever, ‘upstairs, downstairs’ approach that allows the reader to experience life in the courts of Henry VIII in greater detail.

The development of the romance between Thomas Seymour and Katherine seems a bit forced and overdone. Initially, We meet Seymour as a friend of Katherine’s brother, Will Parr, and Katherine takes a dislike to him, seeing him as a womaniser and flatterer. He quickly persuades her of the sincerity if his passion for her, and awakens a similar response in her, one that is threatened by the King’s growing interest in her as one of the few attractive women at court who is also honest, intelligent, and - though this is only seen in undertones - experienced in dealing with illness and age in a partner. The account of Katherine’s marriage touches on most of the known and agreed upon issues - Katherine’s support of the new Protestantism, Henry’s preferences for Catholic forms within his new English church, the antipathy of Archbishop Gardiner, the dangers Katherine must face in being heretically inclined, in Gardiner’s view. Interpretations of the marriage have varied as to the degree of its physicality - Fremantle envisions the aging Henry as a crude and desperate sexual partner, leaving bruises in his attempts to maintain his self-image as a masterful, powerful, lover.

Fremantle does an excellent job of portraying the tension and fear that rise as the king, more and more under Gardiner’s influence, and in increasing pain from his ulcerous leg, withdraws from Katherine, who waits for her turn in the Tower - when Henry’s death saves her. Once Katherine is free of the political machinations at court and installed in her dower property at Chelsea, Seymour re-enters the picture. Always portrayed as ambitious, he now seems more sinister than before, but Katherine still loves him and they are secretly wed. As the story of Katherine’s final year of life unfolds, Seymour’s selfishness, greed and ambition come clear, and then, his seduction of the young Elizabeth - in Fremantle’s version, fully accomplished - which destroys Katherine’s spirit just as she has finally found herself pregnant at last. The end comes swiftly.

All in all, an excellently written novel, and Fremantle’s liberties with certain events and her inventions for the most part add texture to the ultimately tragic story of the sixth of Henry’s queens.

Keeping to the theme of Henry’s wives in my Tudor binge, the next novel I turned to was the third volume in Alison Weir’s series on the queens, Jane Seymour, the Haunted Queen. The novel opens when Jane is a young girl of ten, and uses the occasion of her older sister Catherine’s marriage to introduce the readers to the large Seymour brood - seven living siblings, Edward, Harry, Anthony, Jane, Thomas, Margery and Elizabeth - their ancestry, wealth and connections, and the feel of life in the Seymour ancestral home of Wulfhall. At ten, Jane cherishes the idea of becoming a nun when she is older, and her indulgent parents seem inclined to at least consider this as a possibility, though they insist that she may not become a novice until she is 18. However, when Jane is 18 and begins a probationary period to test her vocation, she discovers that the religious life opens up questions that shake her long-held desire. While the physical constraints - much more severe in this era than a modern nun would face, being forbidden to heat their rooms or touch another human except in emergencies, among others - are difficult to adapt to, it is the way that the abbess violates the vows of poverty that the ordinary nuns must follow that bothers her. Though she is no longer sure of a religious calling, she is also not sure she wants to be married, watching as her brother Edward’s marriage sours and he seeks out other women, leaving his wife deeply unhappy.

Watching her brothers entering the service of various lords temporal and spiritual, Jane aspires to a position at court as well, and a well-placed relative negotiated a place for her as one of the queen’s maid of honour. She arrives at court during the early days of King Henry’s pursuit of Anne Boleyn, who is also a maid of honour, and his search for a way to end his marriage to Queen Katherine. As one of Katherine’s maids of honour, she is a close witness to the actions of both women, and the swirling loyalties of the court. But once the tide is clearly moving toward reform, and the King’s divorce, her family withdraws her from Katherine’s service - much against her will - and secures a position for her among the women serving the Lady Anne. But Jane develops a lingering illness, and before she can take up her place, the split from Rome is complete, the divorce final, and Anne is Queen - and in confinement, awaiting the birth of the child who will be Elizabeth.

As Anne slowly falls from grace, failing to provide a male heir and, in Weir’s interpretation, becoming increasingly flirtatious, petty, jealous and anxious, Henry begins to notice Jane, quiet, gentle and virtuous. His courtship of her is a prolonged one, and she resists his advances for some time, but in this version, she does eventually yield, and is drawn into the plans if those at court, from her brother to the Imperial ambassador Chapuys, to try to influence Henry in his behaviour toward the princess Mary. By now, Jane has left Anne’s service, and lives at court with her brother Edward, an officer of the king’s household, and his wife. Weir passes quickly over Queen Anne’s last days, focusing more on the secret plans for a wedding between Henry and Jane once Anne is dead.

The year of Jane’s queenship was also a year of great trouble in England. There was an outbreak of the plague, which forced the postponement of Jane’s coronation. The closing of the monasteries and other reforms distressed the people, especially in the north where Catholic sentiment was strong, provoking a rebellion which lasted several months before being crushed. Jane, whose religious tendencies also lay with the old religion, walks a delicate line, trying to mitigate some of the worst reforms while keeping the king’s favour. Jane is influential, though, in bringing about a reconciliation between Henry and his estranged daughter Mary. And - though Weir has Jane miscarry twice in the early months of the marriage - soon Jane is pregnant and past the dangerous periods at which she lost those first pregnancies. The days of her pregnancy move swiftly, with Jane hoping, and the King assuming, that the child will be the long-awaited male heir. Jane goes through the thoughts that authors have, and probably quite rightly, put in the minds of most of Henry’s wives, the prayers that their child be a healthy boy, the fears of what might happen if the child is a girl, or is stillborn. Weir’s interpretation of Jane’s final days, following the birth of the desired prince, are based - as she records in a historical note - are based on a modern medical evaluation of Jane’s condition. Rather than dying of childbed or puerperal fever, Weir’s research suggests that, weakened by a difficult labour followed by a severe bout of food poisoning, Jane succumbed to an embolism. Whatever the real cause of her death, Jane slipped away less than two weeks after the birth of the only male heir Henry would ever have, the future Edward VI.

While I was less than wholly pleased with Weir’s interpretation of Anne Boleyn, I quite enjoyed her picture of Jane and her brief career as Queen of England - though I was a bit irritated by the whole ‘haunted queen’ conceit, which had Jane experiening spectral visitations from the venegful ghost of Anne Boleyn. Given the way that Anne is reported to have treated Jane, and the general horror of the accustions against Anne, which were generally believed, I have trouble thinking that Janr’s conscience woukd have troubled her overmuch, especially as there’s no record that she gave incriminating evidence against Anne. But other than that, I found Weir’s novel good reading. Looking forward to seeing how she handles Anne of Cleves.

I’m going to have to look around for some decent writing about poor young Katherine Howard, though.

These days, one of my go-to authors when I’m in need if a comfort read is Peter Tremayne. His Sister Fidelma mysteries just seem to fill a special little place in my soul without being particularly demanding. I’ve been reading them in order, and am currently on the fifth of the Fidelma novels, The Spider’s Web.

In this latest case, Sister Fidelma, once again reunited with her friend and fellow jurist, the Saxon monk, Brother Eadulf, travels to a remote mountain area to investigate the murder of a local chieftain and his sister.

The case would seem to be open and shut - the accused was found beside the chieftain’s body, bloody knife in hand. But Fidelma will not allow anyone to be punished without first having his right to defend himself. But how will she ensure that, when the accused is not only physically deformed, but deaf, dumb and blind from birth?

In fact, Fidelma finds that, far from being a straightforward case, the motivations for these murders - and other strange events that occur during the course of the investigation - are complicated, and have their root in dark secrets more than twenty years old.

One of the aspects of this particular chapter that Caught my attention was the exploration of attitudes toward the disabled. The accused, Moen, is assumed by most to be little more than an animal. The local priest, a convert to the Roman church, holds his condition to be a sign of sin and the work of the devil, and has persuaded the other people living in the chief’s rath, or stronghold, to abhor him. Even Eadulf has little sympathy for one so disabled, citing Saxon customs that would have had Moen killed at birth. But as Fidelma explains the Brehon laws, disabled persons are entitled to respect and care, and to mock or harm a disabled person carried a greater penalty than to so offend an abled person. And her quest to find a way for Moen to tell his story leads to the revelation that he is in fact fully competent intellectually and has learned, thanks to a patient Druid, a way of signing using the Ogham alphabet, and is, in fact, more literate and educated than many of those around him.

A particularly satisfying read.

Judith Tarr’s novel, Living in Threes, is a complex interweaving of three stories, in three times, each story focused on a young woman on the verge of adulthood, navigating the journey of her own growing independence while negotiating changes in her relationships with family, and facing the ultimate challenges of becoming an adult, the parameters of life and loss, birth and death.

In the present, Meredith wants nothing more than to spend the summer before her 16th birthday hanging out with friends, riding and taking care of the horses that she loves - especially Bonnie, her Lippizaner, who is pregnant - doing all the things she’s been planning on. But her mother has a an unwelcome surprise - everything has been arranged for her to spend the summer away from home, friends, and her overworked mother - a cancer survivor - in Egypt, working on a dig with her aunt Jessie, an archaeologist.

Meredith has strange dreams. Some of them are about Meru, a young girl living in the future, soon to become a space pilot, who receives a strange call for help from her mother, supposedly on a mission far from Earth. But when she tracks the message to the source, what she finds is worse than anything she could have imagined - plague, quarantine, and death.

Others are about Meritre, a young Egyptian girl, a singer in a temple chorus. The land is recovering from plague, in which Meritre’s baby sister died. Meritre’s mother, also a singer, is pregnant again, but her health may not be strong enough to carry the baby safely. And while the plague is mostly over, still, her father, a sculptor, is ill with something that worries Meritre.

One thing draws them together - a blue scarab bead. Meritre buys it in a marketplace, Meredith finds it in a tomb, Meru is given it by her mother as a clue. And when each one has the scarab in her own time, the three discover that they have one soul, and that sharing their knowledge and experience can help all of them face the challenges before them.

It’s a beautiful story about three young women, growing up and finding courage to do the impossible.

Laurie King’s The Murder of Mary Russell is not, in fact, about Mary Russell, and - not that anyone will be surprised to hear this - while Mary Russell is indeed feared to be dead by various people for a portion of the book, she is quite alive the whole time.

This is something much more interesting, it is a book about Mrs. Hudson. King has invented a detailed and fascinating past for Holmes’ apparently long-suffering landlady, drawing on bits and pieces from the canon, particularly the early case of the blackmailing of his friend Victor Trevor’s father which was connected to loss of the Gloria Scott at sea. In order to tell her tale, King posits that the conclusion to the case, which Holmes tells Watson and Watson then writes about, was a fabrication to conceal the connection between the blackmailing sailor in the case, James Hudson, and his seemingly unimpeachable landlady Mrs. Hudson.

I’m not going to go into much further detail here, because it is a truly fascinating, if rather improbable backstory for Mrs. Hudson, and the manner in which she became Holmes’ landlady, and watching the whole thing unfold and finally knit together is the greatest pleasure in reading the book.

Suffice it to say that Mrs. Hudson’s past - and Holmes’ initial involvement in her life at a very crucial point - comes back to haunt her, Holmes, Russell, and even Mycroft, and ultimately leads to a parting of the ways between two characters who have been bound together by a shared secret for over forty years.

This is, I think, the best book in the Mary Russell series in quite some time.

Dreaming Spies, Laurie King’s engaging novel of Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes in pre-war Japan, is, as always, a tightly-plotted and action-filled excursion into a world of crime and deduction.

This time, Mary and Holmes are caught up in a web of forgery, blackmail and deceit that touches on the honour of the Japanese Prince Regent, Hirohito, and their allies are members of a family of shinobi - what the west calls ninja - who live to serve the Imperial family in whatever capacity is required.

What I particularly enjoyed about this novel was that we saw Holmes as well as Mary entering a culture they know little about - up until now, Holmes has always been there before, knows the language and customs, has contacts. This time, but are outsiders, both must learn how to move in Japanese society well enough to carry out their roles. And it’s interesting to see Holmes in particular approaching this task with humility. In most circumstances, Holmes seems arrogant because he is frighteningly observant and intelligent - and he knows more than most. Here, where he does not know, he accepts correction, and learns. I liked seeing that aspect of Holmes.

An enjoyable addition to the Mary Russell books. Particularly welcome as the last few books were not as engaging as this, or the early books.

This week I felt a need for some light but still interesting reading, which brought to my mind a series I’d gotten interested in through reading several short stories, but had not gotten around to reading any of the novels. That series is Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma books, set in the seventh century British Isles (primarily Ireland) and featuring an Irish religieuse and lawyer of noble blood and deep perceptions.

The first novel of the series is set in 664 AD, during the Council of Whitby at the abbey of Streoneshalh, run by Hild (St. Hilda), relative of King Oswy of Northumbria, a powerful woman in her own right. At this time, there was a great deal of antagonism between the Roman and Irish/Ionian churches, which were different in a number of small, and not-so-small ways. The Council of Whitby was convened to present arguments before King Oswy for which church should be given royal sanction in Northumbria. Sister Fidelma is present as an advisor on legal matters to the Irish delegation.

On their way to the abbey, Sister Fidelma’s party encounter a grim sight, the hanged corpse of a fellow brother of an Irish church order, and learn that he was killed because his defense of the Irish church was taken as an insult by the local lord, Wulfric. This violence pales, however, before the crime that Fidelma is called upon to investigate - the murder of Etain, abbess of Kildare, and a major proponent of the Irish church. In order to remove all suggestion of possible investigative bias, due to the politically charged atmosphere surrounding the crime, Fidelma is asked to conduct her investigations jointly with a young Saxon monk of the Roman church, Brother Eadulf.

The book follows the standard format of the mystery/ crime procedural, of course. Fidelma and Eadulf observe the crime scene, arrange for an autopsy, interview witnesses, suspects and other persons of interest, gather clues, develop timetables and theories, and so on. What makes the novel particularly interesting to me is the wealth of research into legal and social conventions, monastic life and the variations of Christian doctrine that Tremayne employs in building the background and atmosphere. Details of clothing and patterns of monastic life, differences between Saxon and Irish law, arguments over the correct way to determine the date of the Paschal feast (which the Saxons call Easter after their goddess Oestre), all these things help to make the characters and situations real and interesting.

Of course, as with all historical fiction, Tremayne has made some creative alterations to the bare accounts of the events of the Synod of Whitby. There are no records of an abbess of Kildare named Etain, but then the early records of Kildare are a little sketchy, and Etain, in the novel, had only been abbess nine months before her death. And since Etain dies before the Synod is opened, there would have ben no record of her presence there if she had existed. The death of Archbishop Deusdedit of Canterbury is another bit of creative supposition. One would have expected Deusdedit to speak at the Synod, but he does not appear in the records. He is known to have died around the time of the Synod, probably of plague. It is within the realm of possibility that he did go to Whitby, but fell ill and died without participating.

I enjoyed the short stories I’d read, and I’ve enjoyed reading this novel. I look forward to the rest of the series.

Farah Mendlesohn is best known for her literary criticism, much of it in the areas of fantasy, science fiction, and children’s literature. To these scholarly credits she must now add the accolade of a writer of delightful queer historical romance.

Spring Flowering is the story of Ann Gray, a 27-year-old parson’s daughter who finds herself on the brink of a life of her own following the death of her father. Leaving the parsonage where she grew up for the new world of Birmingham, where her uncle owns and operates a fancy metalwork business, Ann is surrounded by new people, new sights, and new ideas.

But welcome though she is in her uncle’s lively establishment, Ann is not fully content. Accustomed to managing her father’s household after her mother’s death, Ann is now a supernumerary in her aunt’s home. Her cousin Louisa, with whom she has the most in common, has begun to work in the family business - something that Ann had encouraged her uncle to consider, for it was clearly something Louisa longed to do, yet it has left her without a companion. She finds no interest in the courtship offered by Mr. Morden, the young curate who took over her father’s parish. And Jane, the bosom friend of her youth, with whom she had shared a passionate friendship, is now married.

Thus, Ann finds herself both intrigued and somewhat distracted by by the stylish, somewhat older Mrs. King, a widow who has entered into a business partnership with her uncle - especially when Mrs. King offers her the position of governess to her two sons, who are to be educated along with her own cousin, her uncle’s young son and heir, as they will be the next generation of partners in the family business. The offer is exciting, and yet, when Ann goes to visit Jane for a few weeks, it is Louisa whom she finds herself missing most.

The story unfolds slowly and gently, with a keen eye fir the rhythms of family, business and social life that is both entertaining and rewarding.

Behind the story of Ann’s slow flowering, Mendlesohn presents a detailed picture of merchant class life in the early 19th century. I find myself reading about Uncle James and his factory and trade outlet, and thinking that this is what I didn’t see in Jane Austen’s stories - this is something like the life, for instance, that Elizabeth Bennett’s beloved Aunt and Uncle would have lived in London, at a time when family and business were still interwoven. We see hints of the coming industrial age, as successful family-centred trades slowly increase in scope becoming concentrated capital projects. Craftsmen are on the verge of being replaced by labourers at machine lines, even while social changes are bringing about such progressive trends as greater freedom for women and abolition of the slave trade.

Mendlesohn handles the queer aspects of the romance with a deft touch, and it is pleasant to read a lesbian historical romance in which no one seems distressed that Ann does not warm to men, that she has had one ‘particular friendship’ already in her life, and that she is being delicately courted by a woman known to have had such ‘particular friendships’ herself.

To quote the final line in the book, “It all felt very satisfying indeed!”

Laurie R. King's novella Mary Russell's War is a prequel to her Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, covering the year immediately preceding the first volume of that series. It takes the form of a personal journal kept by Mary during the run-up to, and first year of, the first World War.

The journal alternates between events in Mary's life - which include the traumatic accident in which her parents and brother died, and her decision to leave the custodial care of her paternal grandparents in Boston to return to her mother's home in England - and actual photos and news articles that appeared in various American and British publications during the time period covered by the novella.

It was unintended but somewhat serendipitous that I read this so soon after Remembrance Day; the historical war-related documents included in the journal had perhaps a bit more of an impact than they might otherwise have had on me.

It's quite an introduction to Mary Russell, and plants the seeds of much that comes out slowly during the later books of the series. A quick but enjoyable read, with a distinctly serious quality to both the narrative and the additional material.

Joanna Hickson, author of The Agincourt Bride and The Tudor Bride - novels dealing with the life of Catherine Valois, ancestress of the Tudors - continues to follow the early days of the Tudor dynasty with First of the Tudors, a novel featuring Catherine's second son, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke.

In First of the Tudors, we see the early years of the Wars of the Roses through the eyes of a semi-outsider. Half-brother to Henry VI, son of a former queen of England and commoner and a Welshman, ennobled by his royal brother's wish but holding lands in rebellious Wales, Jasper is a Lancastrian by blood, and during the early years of the wars, fiercely loyal to his brother Henry.

Though it was Catherine's oldest son Edmund, Earl of Richmond, who would marry Margaret Beaufort and father the first Tudor monarch, it was Jasper's lifelong devotion to Margaret that ensured the survival of the young Henry VII and his ultimate rise to the throne. After Edmund's death - an early victim of the political and military maneuvering that preceded the civil war between Lancaster and York - Jasper took charge of Margaret, a pregnant widow only 13 years old. As Margaret was under the age of majority, Jasper was awarded guardianship of the infant Henry, and served as the young boy's protector and advisor for most of his life, despite a long separation during his nephew's youth, when his guardianship was granted elsewhere during the first portion of Edward IV's reign. Though Margaret maintained contact with Henry, and sought to advance his claim once he became, in essence, the last Lancastrian heir, her fate as a wealthy heiress under royal wardship meant that she was a valuable marriage prize, and was never in a position to raise her son herself.

Jasper's initial period of guardianship lasted for five years, from Henry's birth to the beginning of Edward IV's reign in 1461, when he was forced to flee the country, and the young Henry Tudor's guardianship granted to one of Edward's supporters.

Jasper spent the early years of the York reign either in exile, separated from both Margaret and the young Henry, or fighting against the Yorkists whenever he managed to secure financial backing from his royal French cousins. The novel follows his story up to the brief restoration of Henry VI to the throne in 1470.

Interspersed with his story is the fictional story of Sian - Jane in English - a Welsh woman who is Henry's governess for most of his early life, and also Jasper's lover and mother of two illegitimate daughters. (There is some indication - but little actual proof - that Jasper fathered one or more illegitimate children; their mother is usually identified as Myfanwy ferch Dafydd. Myfanwy who appear in the novel, but as the lover of Jasper's father Owen and mother of his youngest child Daffyd - who was real enough, but the name of his actual mother is unknown.)

The intimate details of Jasper's imagined family life, and Jane'e efforts to keep the Tudor children - young Daffyd and her own two daughters - safe through the turmoil of the civil war and the York reign help to flesh out and humanise the events in the young Henry Tudor's life during the period of Jasper's exile. Jane is loyal, brave, loving, resourceful and devoted to a man she can never marry, and is as much the protagonist of this tale as Jasper is.

One assumes a sequel is in the works, which will cover the resumption of power by the Yorks, the long years of exile in Brittany and France for both Jasper and the young Henry, now the last living male Lancashire heir, though with a tentative claim to the throne at best, and the accession of Henry VII to the throne. I'm looking forward to its publication.