The Printed Page

• My rating: Excellent (based on entertainment value not historical accuracy which I don’t read for)
• New-to-me author: Yes
• Would I read more from this author: Yes

Title: Legacy: The Acclaimed Novel of Elizabeth, England’s Most Passionate Queen and the Three Men Who Loved Her
Author/website: Susan Kay
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Publication date & page count: July ’10 (org. pub date 1985) & 662 pages

Kay’s prodigious research buttresses this robust historical romance, winner of Britain’s Georgette Heyer Historical Novel Prize and the Betty Trask Prize for a first novel. England’s greatest Queen is presented from an intriguing psychological viewpoint Elizabeth I’s need for men and the bondage endured by those she chose. Freely mixing the verifiable with the imagined, Kay traces Elizabeth’s rise from lonely childhood to lonely eminence. In the person of Robert Dudley, later Leicester, she creates a romantic fulcrum for Elizabeth’s womanliness, delineating the childhood affection for Dudley that flowered in clandestine liaison and may be the closest Elizabeth came to a loving relationship. All of the Court’s intriguing personnel from the ubiquitous, conniving Cecils to the presumptive upstart, Essexare drawn with care; the turbulence of the period, filled with violent deaths, challenges from abroad, pragmatic liaisons, is conveyed with verisimilitude; the rich tapestry of the Tudor ascendancy is woven with colorful threads. It is, however, the depiction of a woman of whom “half the wives of England were jealous” that lingers.