Elizabeth I

Starred review from January 10, 2011
Personal and political conflicts among such larger-than-life historical figures as Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake, and Will Shakespeare intertwine in George's meticulously envisioned portrait of Elizabeth I during the last 25 years of her reign. Unlike most contemporary depictions of the Virgin Queen, this one is actually a virgin; she's married to England, whose interests she pursues with shrewdness, courage, and wisdom borne of surviving the deaths of her family. Readers see the queen through her own eyes and those of her cousin, Lettice Knollys, wife of Elizabethan heartthrob Robert Dudley, aka the earl of Leicester. Elizabeth's antithesis, thrice-married and much-bedded Lettice, is driven by passion and self-interest, easily evidenced by the story's beginnings: it's 1588, and Elizabeth meets the threat of the Spanish Armada head-on while Lettice calculates how her son might benefit. Like her heroine, George (The Autobiography of Henry VIII) possesses an eye for beauty and a knack for detail, creating a vibrant story that, for nearly 700 pages, enables readers to experience firsthand Elizabeth's decisions, triumphs, and losses. Rather than turn Elizabeth I into a romantic heroine, George painstakingly reveals a monarch who defined an era.

Richly detailed, George's historical novel about the final 25 years of Elizabeth I's reign portrays a queen driven by intelligence and sometimes-misguided stubbornness. Narrator Kate Reading subtly differentiates the novel's two points of view--that of Elizabeth and that of her out-of-favor cousin, Lettice Knollys. Reading also provides slight characterizations for the many notables interwoven in Elizabeth's life: William Shakespeare is sharp-witted and languorously sexy; Francis Bacon is unassumingly wise. Reading portrays a queen whose formidable leadership is punctuated in later years by occasional uncertainty about her choice to remain a virgin queen. As Elizabeth ages, and clings to her infamous vanity, she fears that her conquests are overshadowed by her mortality. N.M.C. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine