Edith of Wessex

Edith of Wessex was the daughter of Earl Godwin and the wife of Edward the Confessor. Crowned queen in 1045, she was educated, wealthy and active as a patron, and she remained at court even during her family’s temporary exile. Her brothers included Harold Godwinson and Tostig, placing her at the centre of the succession crisis of 1066. She survived the Norman Conquest and probably commissioned the Vita Ædwardi, an important account of Edward and the Godwin family.

Edith appears in Helen Hollick’s Harold the King and Julian Rathbone’s The Last English King, where she links the royal household to the ambitions and anxieties of her brothers. Historical fiction often depicts her as divided between loyalty to her husband and loyalty to her family. Because the Vita Ædwardi presents a carefully shaped dynastic memory, novelists can also explore Edith as an author or patron of the version of events that she wished to preserve.

In K. M. Ashman’s The Challenges of a King, in AD 1045 Earl Godwin of Wessex prepares for the marriage of his daughter Edith to King Edward, securing the Godwin family's place at the centre of English government.