Sarah Gristwood

The dramatic story of thirteen legendary female rulers who shaped the course of sixteenth-century Europe

The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe

Game of Queens

"[A] gem of a book . . . enlivened by incisive analysis, exquisite detail and an elegant and witty style." -- Alison Weir The Wars of the Roses, which tore apart the ruling Plantagenet family in fifteenth-century England, was truly a domestic drama, as fraught and intimate as any family feud before or since. But as acclaimed historian Sarah Gristwood reveals, while the events of this turbulent time are usually described in terms of the men who fought and died seeking the throne, a handful of powerful women would prove just as decisive as their kinfolks' clashing armies. A richly drawn, absorbing epic, Blood Sisters reveals how women helped to end the Wars of the Roses, paving the way for the Tudor age -- and the creation of modern England.

The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

Blood Sisters

Passion and Politics in the Age of England's Most Famous Dynasty

Tudors in Love

Provides a behind-the-scenes look at the motion picture with facsimilies of the shooting script and a section on costumes.

The Official 50th Anniversary Companion

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Based on letters written by England's "Lost Queen," this revealing portrait describes the niece to Mary Queen of Scots and cousin to Elizabeth I who became a pawn in the power struggles of her age and tried unsuccessfully to flee her fate, dying a tragic death in the tower of London. 15,000 first printing.

England's Lost Queen

Arbella

A double biography of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, their friendship and love affair. Virginia Woolf is one of the world’s most famous writers – a leading light of literary modernism and feminism – and a British icon. During the 1920s she had a passionate affair with a fellow author, Vita Sackville-West, and they remained friends until Virginia’s death in 1941. The hero of Virginia’s novel Orlando was modeled on Vita and the book has been described as ‘one of the longest and most charming love letters in history’. That’s on top of the more than 500 letters they wrote to each other. Vita & Virginia is the extraordinary account of the work, friendship and love affair of two prolific novelists, who came to redefine conventions of femininity, sexuality, art and politics for the modern world. The cultural legacies of these formidable women, enduring icons of sexual equality and female emancipation, proliferate around us today – in fashion and television, film and literature. In this scrupulously researched examination of the pair's long friendship, the National Trust draws on their poetry and treasured correspondence to tell the story of this thoroughly modern affair. Both novelists have become closely associated with the National Trust. Vita is most famous today as the co-creator of Sissinghurst, one of the most influential and visited gardens in the world, while Monk’s House, Virginia’s retreat and inspiration, was a celebrated haunt of the Bloomsbury Group, that influential set of artists, thinkers and writers who lived in squares and loved in triangles.

The lives and love of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

Vita & Virginia

An analysis of the working partnership and intimate bond between Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley discusses the scandal and speculation that surrounded their early romance, the earl's servitude to the queen as her counselor and army commander, and her contrary treatment of him regarding her suitors and his second marriage. 25,000 first printing.

Elizabeth & Leicester

Power, Passion, Politics

Elizabeth  &  Leicester

‘One of the most important books to be written about the Tudors in a generation.’ Tracy Borman ‘A riveting, pacy page-turner… the Tudors as you’ve never seen them before.’ Alison Weir Why did Henry VIII marry six times? Why did Anne Boleyn have to die? Why did Elizabeth I’s courtiers hail her as a goddess come to earth? The dramas of courtly love have captivated centuries of readers and dreamers. Yet too often they’re dismissed as something existing only in books and song – those old legends of King Arthur and chivalric fantasy. Not so. In this ground-breaking history, Sarah Gristwood reveals the way courtly love made and marred the Tudor dynasty. From Henry VIII declaring himself as the ‘loyal and most assured servant’ of Anne Boleyn to the poems lavished on Elizabeth I by her suitors, the Tudors re-enacted the roles of the devoted lovers and capricious mistresses first laid out in the romances of medieval literature. The Tudors in Love dissects the codes of love, desire and power, unveiling romantic obsessions that have shaped the history of this nation.

The Courtly Code Behind the Last Medieval Dynasty

The Tudors in Love

Tracy Borman

Alison Weir

Kate Williams

Presents a history of British royal weddings, from 1066 to 2011.

The Ring and the Crown

A Year of Women's Diaries

Secret Voices

'United across centuries, these women's voices open doors to lost worlds and make them seem familiar. A modern classic.' – Alison Weir, author and historian. A captivating collection of daily extracts from women's diaries, looking back over four centuries to discover how women's experience – of men and children, sex and shopping, work and the natural world – has changed down the years. And, of course, how it hasn't. Organised around the calendar year, in this engaging anthology you'll find Lady Anne Clifford in the seventeenth century and Loran Hurnscot in the twentieth both stoically recording the demands of an unreasonable husband; Joan Wyndham and Anne Frank, at much the same time, but in wildly different settings, describing their first experiences with sex; and Anne Lister (TV's Gentleman Jack) in eighteenth-century Yorkshire exploring her love affairs with women alongside Alice Walker in twentieth-century California. With several selections for each day, from the 1st January to the 31st December, this book is a fascinating record of how women were thinking, feeling and reacting to historical events. From Virginia Woolf relishing her new haircut and Oprah Winfrey meditating on her career to Emilie Davis chronicling the death of Abraham Lincoln and teenage Ma Yan yearning for education in poverty-stricken China, Secret Voices contains a rich mix of well-known diarists and less familiar ones, and often the voices echoing down the centuries sound eerily familiar today.

Desayuno con diamantes

Few women's lives have described such an arc as that of Mary Robinson - or Perdita, as she was widely known. She began her career as an actress, royal mistress and possible blackmailer, and ended it just two decades later as a Romantic poet and early feminist thinker of note. She was the subject of paintings by Gainsborough and Reynolds, and of a hundred political cartoons. Variously portrayed as a wounded innocent and a harlot, she deliberately chose, in her later career, to make a political issue of her sexuality.Born in 1758 in the shadow of Bristol cathedral, she married at fifteen - one Thomas Robinson, an articled clerk of seemingly good family. But Mary had barely made her curtsey to society before discovering that Robinson was little better than a conman. As things grew worse, she followed her husband into debtors' prison, where she wrote her first book of poems. Encouraged by Sheridan and Garrick, who admired her beauty, she went on the stage, and over the next four years appeared in nearly forty plays before being cast as Perdita in A Winter's Tale. The performance was witnessed by the 17-year-old Prince of Wales, and they embarked on a widely satirized liaison that saw the prince offering to pay Mary £20,000 when he came of age. Mary had made her mark in fashionable Georgian high society and this, over the next two momentous decades, was where she contrived to stay.Mary's brief life saw a radical change in western society. Born at a time when women dressed their hair with powder and wore stiff brocade over whalebone, she died when simple muslin shifts clad women in comparative nudity; a sea change as abrupt as any before the advent of the mini-skirt. Above all, her career saw the moments when the French queen lost her head, and America declared independence. With all these events, Mary Robinson was associated; sometimes directly. This wonderful biography, vividly and compellingly told by the acclaimed biographer of Arbella Stuart, will explore Georgian England during a period of extreme political upheaval through the life of one extraordinary woman.

Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic

Perdita

‘Entrancing, compelling, and beautifully written…This is the historical novel as literary fiction – and damned good literary fiction at that.’ Alison Weir

The Girl in the Mirror

The Wars of the Roses, which tore apart the ruling Plantagenet family in fifteenth-century England, was truly a domestic drama, as fraught and intimate as any family feud before or since. But as acclaimed historian Sarah Gristwood reveals, while the events of this turbulent time are usually described in terms of the men who fought and died seeking the throne, a handful of powerful women would prove just as decisive as their kinfolks’ clashing armies. A richly drawn, absorbing epic, Blood Sisters reveals how women helped to end the Wars of the Roses, paving the way for the Tudor age—and the creation of modern England.

To contemporaries, the Wars of the Roses were known collectively as a “cousins' war.” The series of dynastic conflicts that tore apart the ruling Plantagenet family in fifteenth-century England was truly a domestic drama, as fraught and intimate as any family feud before or since. As acclaimed historian Sarah Gristwood reveals in Blood Sisters, while the events of this turbulent time are usually described in terms of the male leads who fought and died seeking the throne, a handful of powerful women would prove just as decisive as their kinfolks' clashing armies. These mothers, wives, and daughters were locked in a web of loyalty and betrayal that would ultimately change the course of English history. In a captivating, multigenerational narrative, Gristwood traces the rise and rule of the seven most critical women in the wars: from Marguerite of Anjou, wife of the Lancastrian Henry VI, who steered the kingdom in her insane husband's stead; to Cecily Neville, matriarch of the rival Yorkist clan, whose son Edward IV murdered his own brother to maintain power; to Margaret Beaufort, who gave up her own claim to the throne in favor of her son, a man who would become the first of a new line of Tudor kings. A richly drawn, absorbing epic, Blood Sisters is a tale of hopeful births alongside bloody deaths, of romance as well as brutal pragmatism. It is a story of how women, and the power that women could wield, helped to end the Wars of the Roses, paving the way for the Tudor age—and the creation of modern England.

The bestselling historian finds a new way to look at the most famous English royal dynasty

La Europa del siglo XVI contempló una explosión de poder femenino. Las mujeres tuvieron un poder sin precedentes. Isabel de Castilla, en traje de armadura, siguió a sus soldados al campo de batalla. Margaret de Austria y Luisa de Saboya, dos reinas regentes, pusieron fin a años de guerra con su «Paz de las Damas». Ana Bolena fue criada en la corte de Margarita de Austria, rodeada de mujeres poderosas; Su hija, Isabel Tudor, creció para ser una de las reinas más famosas de la historia. Con sus límites y sus decisiones, estas mujeres fueron también madres e hijas, mentoras y protegidas, aliadas y enemigos. Por primera vez, Europa vio una hermandad de mujeres que ejercían su autoridad de una manera exclusivamente femenina y que no se equipararía hasta los tiempos modernos. Una fascinante biografía de grupo y una emocionante epopeya política, Juego de reinas explora las vidas de algunas de las reinas más queridas (y vilipendiadas) de la historia. Desde el surgimiento de esta era de reinas hasta su eventual colapso, una cosa será ya cierta: Europa nunca sería la misma.

Sarah Gristwood

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