Waterstones The Women of the Cousins' War
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Price: £9.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: Elizabeth Woodville, The White Queen(2009), Margaret Beaufort, The Red Queen(2010), and Jacquetta, Lady Rivers, The Lady of the Rivers (2011) are the subjects of the first three novels in Philippa Gregory's Cousins' War series, and of the three biographical essays in this book. Philippa Gregory and two historians, leading experts in their field who helped Philippa to research the novels, tell the extraordinary 'true' stories of the life of these women who until now have been largely forgotten by history, their background and times, highlighting questions which are raised in the fiction and illuminating the novels. With a foreword by Philippa Gregory - in which Philippa writes revealingly about the differences between history and fiction and examines the gaps in the historical record - and beautifully illustrated with rare portraits, The Women of the Cousins' Waris an exciting addition to the Philippa Gregory oeuvre.
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781471131752
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9781471131752
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Author: Scooby
Rating: 5
Review: Philippa Gregory is an authoritative historian and an excellent author. She is able to transmit her knowledge clearly and in an interesting style to people who are interested in history but who are not historians themselves. I have been watching and enjoying "The White Queen" on BBC 1 and I also watched the factual programme presented by Philippa Gregory about the Cousins' War, so when I saw "The Women of the Cousins' War" I decided to buy it. It is informative, easy to read and relatively short. I recommend it to anyone who wants to deepen their knowledge of this period in history. I have not read any of Philippa Gregory's fiction but, when I get time, I will do so because I feel sure that the experience will be worthwhile.
Author: Ceskil
Rating: 3
Review: Although the actual biographies provide very useful background material about Elizabeth Woodville, her mother, Jaquetta Rivers, and her daughter's mother-in-law Margaret Beaufort, I found that my Kindle (one of the first models) interfered with rather than enhanced the reading experience. One aspect that is really unsatisfactory is the fact that diagrams remain small and faint. The family trees are an important resource and were virtually unreadable. The main content of the book was okay, and I felt that Phillipa Gregory and her co- writers were careful to emphasise that a great deal of what was presented was based on surmise as none of the women were the subject of contemporaneous records. Everything that is known is y eay on circumstantial evidence The introduction was a very useful essay on the nature of 'historical fact' and effectively argued that all historians select, and therefore edit, the material available and construct a possible scenario. Society changes attitudes in a generation, so it is even harder to look back almost 20 generations and really understand how it felt to be one of those women. On the whole I think the authors were fairly dispassionate in their handling of the known facts, e.g. the marriage of the 12 year old Margaret Beaufort, which to us would appear to be legalised child abuse. Overall I found it shed more light on a very complex period of history and particularly interesting that these were just three of a number of women who were central to the playing out of the events of the Wars of the Roses.
