The Story of Tudor Art by Christina J. Faraday

August 14, 2026Leave a comment

In this interesting and ambitious book, Christina J. Faraday explores the history of Tudor England through its art and objects. The artwork of a particular period can tell us a lot about key historical events, how important figures chose to be portrayed and how people lived, worked and worshipped. Faraday looks at all of these things, moving chronologically forward through time, beginning with art associated with Margaret Beaufort, mother of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, and ending with the reign of Elizabeth I.

Paintings and portraits are naturally given a lot of attention, but Faraday also includes many other types of art from sculptures, tapestries and clothing to jewels, embroideries and furnishings. To show the range of items discussed, some examples include the Dacre Beasts, four 6ft tall figures carved from a single oak tree, now on display at the V&A in London; the Great Bed of Ware, a huge, ornate four-poster bed so famous Shakespeare mentioned it in Twelfth Night; and Cope’s Cabinet of Curiosities, a collection of rare antiquities and artefacts from around the world, reflecting the increase in global exploration during Elizabeth I’s reign.

There’s a fascinating chapter on the emerging class of people known in the 16th century as ‘the middling sort’ – similar to today’s middle class. During the Tudor period, these people began to purchase artworks for their own homes to display their growing wealth and culture. Mostly, though, Faraday focuses on works of art produced for the Tudor monarchs and displayed at court or in churches.

The book looks at the work of the various court painters, many of whom came to England from other European countries, bringing different styles and techniques with them. Some, such as Hans Holbein the Younger, are very well known; others, for example, William (or Guillim) Scrots, are less famous. Little is known about Scrots, but he caused a sensation with his 1546 anamorphic portrait of Edward VI, which is distorted so it can only be viewed clearly from one particular angle. As you would expect, most of the artists at that time were men, but the contributions of female artists Susanna Horenbout and Levina Teerlinc are also discussed.

At first this appeared to be quite a long book, but I found that I got through it much more quickly than I’d expected as around half of the book is made up of notes, a bibliography, a list of image credits and an index. The actual text of the book moves quickly from one monarch’s reign to the next, covering a huge amount of art in each chapter, and it ended up feeling too short rather than too long as there’s not time to go into much depth on anything. Still, it’s a good introduction to the subject and succeeds in showing the overall scope of Tudor art and how things changed between the beginning of the period and the end. Lots of photographs are included, but as I was reading the ebook version I don’t think I could fully appreciate some of these and I’m sure a physical version of the book would work better visually. I think it would make a nice gift for someone studying art history, but for the general reader with an interest in art or the Tudors (or preferably both) there’s a lot to enjoy here as well.

Thanks to Head of Zeus for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 16/20 of 20 Books of Summer

Classics Club Spin #45: My List

August 12, 202632 Comments

It’s time for another Classics Club Spin! If you’re not sure what the Spins are, here’s a reminder:

The rules for Spin #45:

* List any twenty books you have left to read from your Classics Club list.
* Number them from 1 to 20.
* On Sunday 16th August the Classics Club will announce a number.
* This is the book you need to read by 4th October 2026.

And here’s my list:

1. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
2. The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
3. The Bamboo Blonde by Dorothy B. Hughes
4. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
5. The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff
6. Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey
7. The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart
8. A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde
9. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
10. The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope
11. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
12. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
13. The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
14. The Sundial by Shirley Jackson
15. The Marquis of Carabas by Rafael Sabatini
16. The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham
17. Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
18. The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham
19. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
20. Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather

Have you read any of these? Which number should I be hoping for on Sunday?

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Was Reading On This Day Over the Last Ten Years

August 11, 202616 Comments

This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Books I Was Reading On This Day Over the Last Ten Years”.

I’m not sure if my list is entirely accurate – I track my reading through Goodreads and found it easy enough to find the books I’d marked as finished on or just after 11th August each year, but that doesn’t mean I was necessarily actually reading them on that date. Anyway, I’m sure it’s close enough!

Here are my ten books, beginning with 2025 and going back through time to 2016.

2025 – One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie – I’ve been taking part in the Read Christie challenge every year for the last few years, so it’s not surprising that there are two Agatha Christie novels on this list! The one I read last August is a Poirot mystery in which he investigates the murder of a dentist.

2024 – Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives by Alice Loxton – An entertaining nonfiction book containing biographies of eighteen historical figures, with a focus on how their first eighteen years shaped the rest of their lives.

2023 – Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith – Only a small part of this psychological thriller is actually set on a train, but it’s the scene of a very significant meeting between a pair of strangers who find themselves discussing a plan to commit two perfect murders!

2022 – The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper – Ancient Rome is not usually a favourite setting of mine, but I found this novel about a group of prostitutes working in a Pompeii brothel completely absorbing.

2021 – The Sussex Downs Murder by John Bude – A British Library Crime Classic first published in 1936 and one of many John Bude novels to feature Superintendent William Meredith. I enjoyed it, but found the solution to the mystery too easy to guess – something I don’t say very often!

2020 – Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie – The second Christie novel on my list and my favourite of the two. This time it’s a Miss Marple mystery – the final Miss Marple novel to be published, in fact – and I found it a particularly atmospheric one.

2019 – The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware – our narrator Rowan Caine arrives at Heatherbrae House in Scotland to find that she is just the latest in a long string of nannies in a very short time period. Could the ghostly occurrences taking place in the house be the reason?

2018 – Post of Honour by RF Delderfield – The second book in Delderfield’s A Horseman Riding By trilogy is set during the First World War and explores the impact on the lives of the inhabitants of Devon’s Sorrel Valley.

2017 – Shadow of the Moon by M.M. Kaye – I read this as part of a readalong and loved it, which was no surprise as Kaye’s The Far Pavilions is one of my all-time favourite books. Both books are set in India but are completely separate novels and this one takes place before and during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.

2016 – Exposure by Helen Dunmore – I loved this book which on the surface is a Cold War spy novel but has so many extra layers it becomes something quite different, exploring the consequences of one decision on the lives of a man and his family.

Have you read any of these?

Troubled Waters by Ichiyō Higuchi – #WITMonth

August 10, 20266 Comments

Translated by Bryan Karetnyk

August is Women in Translation Month and I’ve chosen to start with a collection of short stories by an author often described as Japan’s first professional woman writer of the modern era. Born Higuchi Natsuko in 1872, she was the daughter of a peasant who had just managed to achieve samurai status a year before the Meiji Restoration period began, leading to the samurai caste being abolished. After her father’s death, Higuchi and her mother and sister were left struggling financially and Higuchi decided to support her family through her writing. Using the pseudonym Higuchi Ichiyō (in Japanese, the first name comes last), she had her first story published in a magazine in 1892 and went on to write more stories, poems, essays and a diary before dying from tuberculosis at the age of just twenty-four.

This new collection from Pushkin Press contains five of her stories published between 1893 and 1895. The first, A Snowy Day (Yuki no hi), is a beautifully written story in which our narrator looks back on her school days, when she fell in love with an unsuitable man, and reflects on the disillusionment she now feels due to decisions made during that time. Although it’s the shortest story in the book, it has a powerful emotional impact and was the perfect introduction to Higuchi’s work. The second story New Year’s Eve (Ōtsugomori) was even better – probably my favourite of the five. It follows O-Mine, a young woman working as a maid in a rich household, who asks her employer for an advance on her salary so she can help her uncle who is ill and struggling financially. Her employer agrees then cruelly pretends to forget, leaving O-Mine contemplating stealing. I particularly loved the ending which is ambiguous but also very satisfying.

Growing Pains (Takekurabe) is a novella-length story and another I enjoyed. It tells the story of a group of young people living in Yoshiwara, Tokyo’s red light district, and revolves around a feud between two rival gangs, one led by Chōkichi, the son of a construction foreman, and the other by Shōtarō, a pawnbroker’s son. We also meet the shy, serious Nobu, whose father is the local priest, and fourteen-year-old Midori, a bright, lively girl who is being groomed to become a courtesan like her older sister. As this group of children grow older they begin to discover that their hopes and dreams for the future are unlikely to come true as their paths have already been laid out for them by their parents and society. I loved all the insights we get into Japanese culture and the summer and winter festivals, and because this is the longest story in the collection, there’s more time for character development as well.

Karetnyk states in his introduction at the beginning of the book that he has tried to preserve Ichiyō’s classical Japanese writing style, which means there are no quotation marks around dialogue, with sentences and paragraphs often running together into one long section of prose. I found the first three stories easy enough to follow, but for some reason the style was more of a problem for me with the fourth, Troubled Waters (Nigorie), and I sometimes struggled to tell where one person had finished speaking and another had started. For that reason, this story wasn’t one of my favourites, but it’s still a striking depiction of the fate of courtesans, focusing on O-Riki and one of her clients, who has become infatuated with her.

The final story is This Mortal Coil (Utsusemi) and it’s another very short one. It explores a young woman’s overwhelming feelings of guilt that cause her to descend into mental and physical illness. I found it the weakest of the five stories in the book, but it was still interesting and apparently this is the first time this particular story has been translated into English. I would definitely recommend this collection as a whole for what it tells us about Meiji-era Japan and the lives of women during that period. For me personally, most of the Japanese literature I’ve read has been crime, so it was good to have the opportunity to try something different!

Thanks to Pushkin Press Classics for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 15/20 of 20 Books of Summer

The Boleyn Secret by Alison Weir

August 7, 202621 Comments

Alison Weir has written so many novels about the Tudors it’s surprising that she’s still able to find different angles and perspectives to write from. In The Boleyn Secret, she tells the story of Kate Carey, daughter of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary and, some believe, Henry VIII himself. There have been other books about Kate, but I haven’t read any (apart from where she’s mentioned as a minor character), so reading a whole book from her point of view was something new for me.

Katherine Carey (referred to as Kate throughout the book, so I will do the same) was born in 1524 to Mary Boleyn and her husband, William Carey, However, as Mary was having an affair with Henry VIII around this time, many historians have suggested that he was the true father, although this has never been confirmed and Henry never acknowledged Kate as his daughter. For the purposes of this novel, Weir assumes that the rumours were true and that Kate was aware that Henry was her father. She uses this idea to explore how this knowledge may have impacted on Kate’s life, how she discovered it and whether she wanted it to be known.

The book begins with the twelve-year-old Kate witnessing the execution of her aunt, Anne Boleyn (another story that has never been confirmed). We are then taken through the whole of Kate’s life, encompassing her close relationship with her cousin and half-sister Elizabeth (the future queen), her marriage to Sir Francis Knollys, her view on key historical events such as Henry VIII’s next four marriages, the reigns of Edward VI and Queen Mary, religious change and turmoil, and finally the long reign of Queen Elizabeth and the downfall of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Having read all of Weir’s Six Tudor Queens series and several of her other Tudor novels, a lot of this felt repetitive as I was just seeing the same events from yet another perspective. However, there was still plenty of new material, mainly surrounding Kate’s family life with Francis and their sixteen (yes, sixteen!) children. Kate and Francis appear to have had a genuinely happy marriage, a nice change from all the unhappy marriages that often fill the pages of historical novels! I particularly enjoyed the part of the book where they, as Calvinists, go into exile in Europe during the reign of Mary I and her Protestant burnings. Weir admits in her author’s note, though, that this episode of their lives is poorly documented so she had to use her imagination here.

Elizabeth is a huge presence in Kate’s life; they are very close from childhood and Kate loves her as a sister, although she’s never quite sure whether Elizabeth knows the truth about their relationship and is afraid to bring the subject up herself. Elizabeth is presented as a complex person of many contradictions: she can be exceptionally generous and thoughtful, but also incredibly selfish; she often seems cold-hearted and appears to be jealous and resentful of Kate’s loving marriage to Francis, but she also has a vulnerable side and relies on Kate for friendship and support. It’s frustrating to see how Elizabeth repeatedly finds ways to keep Kate and Francis apart, purely because she doesn’t want to share Kate with anyone else; I don’t think I could have kept forgiving her the way Kate did – but of course, in the turbulent Tudor period it was important to stay on the right side of your king or queen!

Overall, I enjoyed this book but I thought it felt unnecessarily long, a common criticism I have of Alison Weir’s novels. I understand that she wants to include as much information as possible to give a full picture of the subject she’s writing about, but this is fiction, not non-fiction, and I’m sure there must have been things that could be left out or condensed to make the story more fun to read. Still, it was interesting to have the opportunity to learn more about Kate Carey and her family. Alison Weir’s next novel will be The Pretender’s Wife, about Lady Catherine Gordon and Perkin Warbeck, so that’s something to look forward to.

Thanks to Headline for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 14/20 of 20 Books of Summer

No Fair Maidens by Kim Willis

August 6, 202615 Comments

I’ve read a lot of Greek mythology but very little British mythology, so when I came across No Fair Maidens on NetGalley it seemed like a good opportunity to rectify that. However, I don’t think I read the description of the book properly as it wasn’t quite the exploration of British goddesses that I’d expected but more of a memoir of the author’s own personal journey. Looking at other reviews, it seems a lot of people made the same mistake, but I think as long as you know what kind of book it is before you start, there’s still a lot to enjoy here.

Kim Willis begins by telling us about a time in her life when she began to struggle with mental health issues. She had just been told (wrongly) that she would never be able to have children and was left feeling depressed and empty. It was then that she took a trip to the mouth of the River Severn and drew inspiration from the story of the goddess Sabrina (or Hafren in Welsh), whose name over the centuries became Severn. Sabrina and her two sisters fell to earth in the form of single raindrops and then each chose her own route to the sea, growing and swelling as they went. Willis found it motivating to think of these three women charting a path for themselves with no maps to show the way – and this led her to investigate the stories of other mythical British women.

I had heard of some of the women featured in the book; Morgan le Fay, who appears in the Arthurian legends usually as King Arthur’s half-sister, is probably the most famous, but I was also already familiar with Melusine, the water spirit who turns into a snake for several days each month. The others I knew little to nothing about – Coventina, Arianrhod, Scáthach and my two favourites, Cerridwen and Gwendoline. I won’t say too much about any of the individual women as you may prefer to discover their stories for yourself, but all of them are fascinating and, interestingly, they are all associated with water in some way.

However, relatively little time is spent on the actual myths; most of them are told in just a few pages embedded into each chapter. Much more attention is given to the author’s own reactions to learning about the myths, how she found them inspiring and healing and how they gave her the strength to move forward. Although I appreciate her courage in being so open and honest with the reader about her life and her mental health, I didn’t personally find any of this particularly interesting and struggled to identify with her personality and way of life. I’m sure other readers will like this aspect of the book and find it helpful; it just depends on what you’re looking for, I think.

I did enjoy reading about the author’s travels around England, Scotland and Wales to get to the source of each of the stories and stand on the land where our eight mythological women may once have stood. I’ve been left wanting to know more about these myths – and maybe I’ll actually get round to reading The Mabinogion one of these days!

Thanks to Doubleday for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 13/20 of 20 Books of Summer

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with water on the cover

August 4, 202618 Comments

This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: Cover Freebie (Pick any topic related to book covers. You can make up your own topic or pick one from the list of previous ones!)

I decided to find ten books with bodies of water on the cover – rivers, lakes, seas etc. It was more difficult than I expected but I got there eventually! I have written about all of these books on my blog and have linked to my reviews if you’d like to see my thoughts.