By Sword and Storm by Margaret Skea

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This is the third novel in Margaret Skea’s Munro Scottish Saga set in 16th century Scotland and France and based on the history of a clan feud known as the Ayrshire Vendetta. I haven’t read the first two, Turn of the Tide and A House Divided, but that didn’t affect my enjoyment of this third book.

The novel opens in 1598 with Adam Munro, a colonel in the Scots Gardes, living in France with his wife Kate, who has skills as a healer, and their three children, Robbie, Maggie and Ellie. One of the functions of Adam’s regiment is to provide protection to Henri IV of France and when Adam saves the king’s life while risking his own in the process, the Munro family are rewarded with an invitation to come and live at the French court.

In Scotland, meanwhile, the feud between the Cunninghames and Montgomeries is supposedly at an end and the Scottish king, James VI, has banned unauthorised duelling. Most of the family members are trying to keep the peace, but two of them – Hugh Montgomerie and William Cunninghame – are still not prepared to let things rest. The Scottish storyline and the French one alternate throughout the book, eventually coming together as the novel heads towards its conclusion.

By Sword and Storm is a mixture of fact and fiction; many of the characters are real historical figures while others come from the author’s imagination – if you want to know who really existed and who didn’t, there’s a character list at the beginning of the book. Apart from the storylines involving the fictional characters, the novel is grounded in historical fact and has obviously been well researched. I loved the portrayal of life at the court of France, where Kate gets to know the king’s mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, and I sympathised with Maggie, who longs to study medicine and despite being given opportunities in France that would not have been open to her in Scotland, still faces obstacles because of her sex.

The political and religious situation in France at that time also plays a part in the story. At the beginning of the novel we see Henri IV issuing the Edict of Nantes, bringing the French Wars of Religion to an end and giving the Huguenots more freedom. However, it is still not safe for people in Paris to worship as they wish, as Kate and Adam’s son, Robbie, discovers when he becomes romantically involved with a Huguenot girl. I think Margaret Skea does a good job of showing the many dangers of 16th century life, not only where religion was concerned, but also for pregnant women before and during childbirth, patients with the sort of illness or injury that could be easily treated today, and anyone who had to travel by ship. It’s a period I love to read about but would not have liked to have lived through!

I really enjoyed By Sword and Storm. I liked the characters and even though I hadn’t been with them from the beginning, I found it easy enough to jump into their story and follow what was happening. Although this was meant to be the third in a trilogy, at the end of the novel I felt that there was still scope for more, so I was pleased to find that Margaret Skea has said she may return to this story again in the future.

Thanks to the publisher Corazon Books for providing a copy of this book for review.

Golden Lads by Daphne du Maurier

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When I was making my list for this year’s R.I.P. challenge last week, I remembered that one of the books I read for last year’s R.I.P. was Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce mystery As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust. The title was from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: “Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust” – the same lines that inspired the title of Daphne du Maurier’s Golden Lads: A Study of Anthony Bacon, Francis and Their Friends, a book I’ve been interested in reading for a while. Having been reminded of it, I picked it up and started reading, knowing that I have to be in the right mood for non-fiction.

Golden Lads was published in 1975 and was followed a year later by a second volume, The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall, which I may or may not read at some point. I love Daphne du Maurier and since discovering Rebecca as a teenager, I have read almost all of her novels and most of her short story collections, but only one of her non-fiction books, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë. I remember finding the Brontë biography almost as readable as her fiction, so I hoped this book would be the same. And it is certainly very readable – it only took a few days to read and was quite a page-turner at times, probably because, as stated in the introduction, du Maurier was writing this book with ‘her sort of reader’ in mind.

Anthony Bacon (born in 1558) and his younger brother Francis (born in 1561) were the sons of Sir Nicholas Bacon, who was Elizabeth I’s Lord Keeper of the Great Seal and one of the most powerful men in England. Their mother, Anne Cooke, was the sister-in-law of the Lord High Treasurer William Cecil, Elizabeth’s most trusted adviser. With such impressive family connections, the Bacon brothers were well placed to develop glittering careers of their own, but for Anthony that never quite happened, and for Francis not as quickly as he’d hoped.

After attending Cambridge University together at the ages of fifteen and twelve, their lives went in different directions with Francis entering Gray’s Inn as a lawyer while Anthony spent several years in Europe building up a network of contacts to send intelligence back to Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. During this period he became a friend of Henri of Navarre (later Henri IV of France) and the French essayist Montaigne. I was intrigued to find that another of his friends was Antonio Perez, whom I met just a few weeks ago in That Lady by Kate O’Brien! On his return to England in 1592, however, Anthony seems to have kept a low profile, which du Maurier explains as being as a result of his increasingly poor health (he suffered from gout and possibly other illnesses as well) but also due to a scandal which took place during his time in Montauban and for which du Maurier found new evidence in the form of archival records.

Francis is the best known of the Bacon brothers today, but most of the accomplishments in science, politics, philosophy and literature for which he is remembered are not discussed in Golden Lads as this book concentrates more on Anthony and only covers the period up to 1601. I didn’t mind this as I knew nothing at all about Anthony and was glad to have the opportunity to learn something new, but I didn’t feel that I got to know Francis very well at all. For that, I will obviously need to read The Winding Stair – although I’m not sure if or when I will get round to reading that book.

I found a lot to like about Golden Lads. As I’ve said, du Maurier’s writing style makes it easy to read and it’s obvious that she is enthusiastic about her subject. She includes extracts from letters and occasional bits of dialogue written in play format, which adds some variety, but readers who are hoping for an academic, scholarly biography might be disappointed as not everything is fully referenced (although she does include a bibliography and list of sources at the back of the book). I thought the first half of the book, which covers the Bacons’ early lives, was very enjoyable, but in the second half the focus switches to Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, and his military exploits in Cadiz and Ireland and this is where I started to get bored. I have read about Essex before and although I understand the important role he played in the lives of Anthony and Francis Bacon, I didn’t really want to read about him again in so much detail.

Golden Lads will not be a book for everyone, but I can definitely recommend it to readers who are particularly interested in Elizabethan England. I enjoyed it overall, but I’m not sure if I enjoyed it enough to want to continue with The Winding Stair. Has anyone read it – or any of du Maurier’s other non-fiction?

20 Books of Summer 2018 – The End

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This is the last day of this year’s 20 Books of Summer challenge hosted by Cathy at 746 Books. It’s the second time I’ve participated and although I haven’t been completely successful with it, I’ve still enjoyed taking part. It’s a simple idea – to make a list of twenty books at the start of the summer and then read them between 1st June and 3rd September – but not that easy when you keep getting distracted by other books! I’ve read more than twenty books this summer, but only fifteen that were on my original list.

Here are the fifteen books in the order I read them, with links to my reviews:

1. For the Immortal by Emily Hauser
2. The Poison Bed by EC Fremantle
3. A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor
4. Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy
5. The Story Keeper by Anna Mazzola
6. My Beautiful Imperial by Rhiannon Lewis
7. The King’s Witch by Tracy Borman
8. Don’t Look Now and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier
9. Post of Honour by RF Delderfield
10. Fool’s Errand by Robin Hobb
11. Lamentation by CJ Sansom
12. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
13. The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry
14. Marking Time by Elizabeth Jane Howard
15. Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim

I enjoyed all of these, especially Desperate Remedies, Post of Honour, Fool’s Errand, Lamentation and Marking Time.

And here are the books I didn’t have time for:

16. The Bull from the Sea by Mary Renault
17. Tapestry of War by Jane MacKenzie
18. Fortune’s Fool by David Blixt
19. The Wardrobe Mistress by Patrick McGrath
20. The Craftsman by Sharon Bolton

I’m still planning to read those books – in fact, I’m halfway through The Bull from the Sea now – but they will have to be autumn reads instead of summer ones.

Did you take part in 20 Books of Summer this year? How did you do?

Six Degrees of Separation: From Mara Wilson to Edgar Allan Poe

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It’s the first weekend of a new month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we begin with Where Am I Now? by Mara Wilson. When I first saw that this was the starting point for the chain, I struggled to think of who Mara Wilson was, but I discovered she was the child actress in Mrs Doubtfire and Matilda.

Roald Dahl’s Matilda is a great children’s book, but that’s not the book I’m going to choose for my first link. Instead I’m going to link to a non-fiction book about not just one Matilda, but four – Matilda of Flanders, Matilda of Scotland, Matilda of Boulogne and the Empress Matilda (sometimes known as Maud). The lives of these four medieval queens are explored in Alison Weir’s Queens of the Conquest.

One of the anecdotes I remember reading about Empress Matilda involves her escape from Oxford Castle during a siege wearing a white cape as camouflage against the snow. Thinking of women dressed in white leads me, quite obviously, to The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

The Woman in White is one of my favourite Victorian novels and the intelligent, resourceful Marian Halcombe is one of my favourite heroines. Another Victorian novel with a strong and memorable, though very different, female protagonist is Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray.

It’s been a long time since I last read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, but it’s a book I loved when I was younger and read over and over again. I was sure I could remember a chapter with ‘Vanity Fair’ in the title, so I checked my old copy and yes – Chapter 9: Meg Goes To Vanity Fair. It’s amazing the things you remember!

Louisa May Alcott is one of several historical figures to appear as a character in Mrs Poe by Lynn Cullen, a novel telling the story of the poet Frances Sargent Osgood. Frances is known to have exchanged a series of romantic poems with Edgar Allan Poe and this book explores their relationship.

And that brings me to my final link: The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I chose a selection of stories from the book to re-read last Halloween and I’m thinking about doing the same this year.

That’s my chain for this month! Have you read any of these books?

Next month we will be starting with The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton.

My Commonplace Book: August 2018

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A selection of words and pictures to represent August’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

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Yet even without deliberately attempting to cut and discard pieces of a story, years after giving a full and just accounting of an event, a man may discover himself a liar. Such lies happen not by intent, but purely by virtue of the facts he was not privy to at the time he wrote, or by being ignorant of the significance of trivial events. No one is pleased to discover himself in such a strait, but any man who claims never to have experienced it is but stacking one lie on top of another.

Fool’s Errand by Robin Hobb (2001)

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Branwell Brontë’s portrait of Anne, Emily and Charlotte.

‘That’s just what I feel. What is profoundly personal cannot be exposed without -‘ Emily stopped.

‘Without what?’

‘Betraying it.’

‘Well! But what about our work?’

‘That’s fiction. It’s the stuff of your experience, perhaps, but not the stuff of your souls.’ She spoke quite matter-of-factly and without any special emphasis; yet Anne and Charlotte were silenced.

Dark Quartet by Lynne Reid Banks (1976)

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Two steps. Two steps were all it took. An ocean; a universe. A gulf separating innocence from almost certain damnation. And yet innocence can be a burden and above all rarely profitable. Innocence affords private satisfaction; money and power simple recompense.

The Lady Agnès Mystery by Andrea Japp (2006)

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“The trouble is,” said Laura, “walking in Venice becomes compulsive once you start. Just over the next bridge, you say, and then the next one beckons.”

Don’t Look Now and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier (1971)

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Achilles’ surrender of Briseis to Agamemnon

Would you really have married the man who’d killed your brothers?

Well, first of all, I wouldn’t have been given a choice. But yes, probably. Yes. I was a slave, and a slave will do anything, anything at all, to stop being a thing and become a person again.

I just don’t know how you could do that.

Well, no, of course you don’t. You’ve never been a slave.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (2018)

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‘Germany will declare war on France tomorrow, if she hasn’t already done so. As for us, we shall be in by Tuesday at the latest!’

‘How can you be so sure?’ Paul demanded. ‘Grenfell rang two days ago and said it depended upon half-a-dozen unknown factors, any of which might result in us standing aside.’

Franz said, ‘My dear boy, the politicians are the clowns who provide the curtain raiser, an entirely different cast act the play!’

Post of Honour by R.F. Delderfield (1966)

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‘In my work I never calculate on persons, as apart from what I see them do. A person more or less is of no account in state affairs – it is what he promotes and what he does that I have to reckon with. I see your recent actions and your future intentions, and I hold them to be invidious. So I am not interested in emotional recollections of the kind of person you are, or seemed to be. I only work on what I see you doing.’

That Lady by Kate O’Brien (1946)

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Coat of arms of Henry VII, founder of the House of Tudor

A man who carries the blood of Lancaster in his veins and has the Welsh dragon at his heel is a constant threat to York. The time may not be yet, Harri, but when the time comes, it is to you that the followers of the dragon will look for leadership. I look towards the crown for you – a Tudor crown.’

The Tudor Crown by Joanna Hickson (2018)

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‘But you see,’ she said, ‘we are not either of them. However much we care for other people, we cannot become them. People can only do as much as they are. It may be more than we could do, it may be less, but very often it will be different. Sometimes that is very hard to bear, as I know you know.’

Marking Time by Elizabeth Jane Howard (1991)

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Title page of The Lamentation of a Sinner by Catherine Parr

She looked round the gallery. ‘This is my favourite place in this palace. Where I can walk undisturbed, and rest my eyes on its treasures.’

‘There is much beauty here.’

‘The clocks remind me that however frantically courtiers plot and plan beyond these doors, time ticks by regardless.’ She looked at me directly with her hazel eyes. ‘Taking us to our judgement.’

Lamentation by CJ Sansom (2014)

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What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and I don’t know what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily.

Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim (1898)

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A serious note crept into Elizabeth’s voice. ‘There is much to be said for a lack of ambition. I would not be sorry should you think less of advancement and more of the content to be had in small things.’

‘No more would I, should we be allowed that luxury.’

She ignored the implication, sought to counter it. ‘Surely we should be able to find much to take pleasure in within our own bounds.’ There was a sound of scuffling from above their heads, followed by a shriek and a succession of giggles. ‘Family for one. Our children healthy and happy and full of life.’

By Sword and Storm by Margaret Skea (2018)

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Favourite books read in August:

Fool’s Errand, Dark Quartet, Lamentation and Marking Time.

Where did my reading take me in August?

England, France, Italy, Crete, Ireland, Israel, Ancient Greece, Spain, Germany, Scotland

Authors read for the first time in August:

Lynne Reid Banks, Andrea Japp, Pat Barker, Kate O’Brien, Margaret Skea

~

Have you read any of these books? Which books did you enjoy in August?

Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim

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Today would have been Elizabeth von Arnim’s birthday and she is the next author to be celebrated in Jane from Beyond Eden Rock’s Birthday Book of Underappreciated Lady Authors. Having previously read only The Enchanted April, I had plenty of von Arnim books to choose from, but as my experience of her work is so limited, it seemed sensible to pick another of her better known ones to read next. I hoped Elizabeth and Her German Garden would be a good choice…and it was.

Published in 1898, the book has an autobiographical feel and is written in the form of a diary in which the narrator, Elizabeth, takes us through a year in her life, describing her love for the garden of her home in northern Germany and the changes she sees as the seasons go by. At the beginning of the book Elizabeth knows little about gardening, so there is a sense that she is learning by trial and error as she goes along, discovering which flowers will grow in the soil and climate and which won’t, and trying out different colours and arrangements in different beds. Of course, due to her gender and class, she doesn’t do the hard work herself – she has gardeners to dig and plant for her – but this is a source of frustration to Elizabeth, as the gardeners never seem quite able to bring her visions to life!

Elizabeth is the sort of person who is perfectly happy on her own, as long as she can be outdoors, surrounded by the beauty of nature, and she doesn’t at all regret the city life she has left behind. And in any case, she rarely has time to feel lonely as she has her three young daughters for company. We never learn their names as Elizabeth refers to them simply as the April baby, May baby and June baby (although at five, four and three they are no longer really babies), but it is obvious that she loves them very much – even if she does despair of them at times! The babies provide a lot of the humour in the book, as children often do. Her feelings for her husband are slightly less tender; she calls him ‘The Man of Wrath’, which probably says a lot about their relationship!

Despite her love of peace and quiet, Elizabeth does find herself entertaining visitors now and then, including two who come to stay for the winter: Irais, who shares Elizabeth’s dislike of convention and becomes a good friend, and Minora, a young woman from England who is writing a book on the German way of life and spends most of the winter irritating Elizabeth and Irais with her questions and observations. The women also have some interesting discussions with The Man of Wrath, in which he makes it clear that he thinks a woman’s place is in the home. I suppose The Man is a man of his time, while Elizabeth is a woman ahead of hers.

Although my lifestyle is very different from Elizabeth’s, I liked and understood her almost as soon as I began to read. I’m not much of a gardener myself but, like Elizabeth, I do enjoy sitting outside and reading in the garden on a warm summer’s day and I have always envied those women from years gone by who lived on large country estates with huge gardens to wander in. Elizabeth and Her German Garden is a lovely read; I found it light, entertaining and often funny, with a similar feel to Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield. I will be reading the sequel, The Solitary Summer.

This is the last book I will have time to finish and review for my 20 Books of Summer this year. I have managed 15/20 and will post a full summary of the challenge next week.

Classics Spin Review: That Lady by Kate O’Brien

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Kate O’Brien’s novel from 1946, That Lady, was the book chosen for me in the recent Classics Club Spin. I had never read anything by Kate O’Brien before and had only added this one to my Classics Club list because I remembered reading some very positive reviews by Lisa and Kay and because I liked the portrait on the front cover of the Virago Modern Classics edition. The portrait shows Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Eboli and Duchess of Pastrana, and Ana’s life is the subject of the novel.

That Lady opens in 1576, with Ana a widow of thirty-six. Following the death of her husband Ruy Gomez de Silva, one of King Philip II of Spain’s closest advisers, Ana and her children have continued to live on Ruy’s lands in Pastrana in the region of Castile. If you know nothing about Ana, as I didn’t before reading this book, you’ll be pleased to know that O’Brien gives plenty of detail on Ana’s background, explaining how she came to be married to Ruy Gomez at the age of thirteen, how she lost her eye fighting a duel with a page in her father’s household, and the origins of her close relationship with Philip II.

Early in the novel, Philip visits Ana at the Palace of Pastrana and asks her to consider coming back to Madrid. He gives several reasons why she should return, but it is clear that he misses Ana and her children and wants them living nearer to him. Ana is reluctant, but within a year she is back in Madrid and here she begins an affair with Antonio Perez, Philip’s ambitious secretary of state. Needless to say, this was not what the king had intended, and when Ana’s affair becomes public – and, worse still, leads to her becoming implicated in a murder case – she finds that Philip is not such a good friend after all.

That Lady is an unusual novel and at first I wasn’t sure whether I was going to like it. The pace is slow and although there is a lot happening, most of it happens off the page; major events including the defeat of the Spanish Armada are covered in a few brief sentences, while dramas which directly affect Ana, such as the murder mentioned above and the circumstances which lead to it, are only referred to in conversation afterwards. The lack of action makes this much more of a character driven novel, which I’m usually quite happy with, but I also struggled to understand and warm to Ana as a character during the first half of the novel.

Somewhere in the middle of the book, though, I began to find Ana’s story much more compelling. I understood why her relationship with Antonio was so important to her, despite the disapproval of Philip and the public – because it was her own choice, something she was doing because she wanted to, and not because she had been pushed into it by her father, by her husband or by the king. I admired her for sticking to her principles and I was impressed by the loyalty she inspired in her young daughter, Anichu, and her servant, Bernardina. Ana also finds herself struggling to reconcile her actions with her religious beliefs and this is another of the novel’s themes, which develops through conversations with her friend, Cardinal Quiroga of Toledo.

I found it intriguing that in her foreword to That Lady, O’Brien states that this is not a historical novel, but an ‘invention’ based on the story of Ana de Mendoza and Philip II, in which the outline of historical events is real but the words, thoughts and emotions of the characters are imaginary. I think I know what she was trying to say, but surely any historical novel contains an element of invention, otherwise it wouldn’t be a novel. Anyway, I was able to learn a huge amount from this book, not just about Ana, Philip and Antonio, but also about the political situation in Spain in the late sixteenth century. Most of this was new to me and the amount of detail made it quite a slow read, but an interesting one too.

I was left wanting to know more about the real woman, so I looked her up online and found a selection of portraits of Ana, with her distinctive silk eye patch (although it seems there could be a less dramatic explanation for the loss of her eye than the duelling story). I couldn’t find any other novels about Ana, but if you know of any, please let me know. And if you’ve read this book, I would love to hear what you thought of it – and whether you would recommend anything else by Kate O’Brien.

This is book 8/50 from my second Classics Club list.