Elizabeth’s Women

Name: Elizabeth’s Women
Rating: 4.4 (470 reviews)

by Tracy Borman

First published 2009

Amazon

4.3(470)

Elizabeth I’s life was shaped by women long before she became queen: the absent memory of Anne Boleyn, the stepmothers and governesses who helped raise her, and the half-sister whose crown she eventually inherited. Tracy Borman follows these relationships into Elizabeth’s reign, examining the women who served, challenged, advised and sometimes threatened a monarch who made female independence central to her public identity.

Mary I, Mary, Queen of Scots, the Grey sisters, Lettice Knollys and Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting reveal different forms of kinship, rivalry and intimacy around the throne. Their stories expose the private pressures behind the image of the Virgin Queen and show how friendship, marriage, fertility and dynastic danger affected the choices of a woman ruling within a political culture dominated by men.