Here's what I wrote after reading in 1987: "The story of Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boelyn and Queen of England for ~fifty years. Book is fiction in that is contains dialog and examines relationships. However, much of what the book contains is documented fact. Most interesting learning: She was a willy and canny politician and yet used her femininity for all it was worth. She feigned illness. She acted interested in marriage when she was not, she fainted at convenient times." Much has been written about this amazing woman and I did indeed enjoy this first dip into learning about her. ( )

The story of Queen Elizabeth I, a woman who spends a lifetime in search of a man strong enough to be her equal - and of the men who suffer for their devotion to her. ( )

The rather simplistic characterization of Elizabeth as selfish, manipulative and nasty spoiled this book for me. ( )

I LOVED this book. There were a few things which made me wince and I had to remind myself that it's meant to be fiction. Could Dudley and Elizabeth been lovers all those years right under William Cecil's (not to mention the entire court's) nose? We'll never know and I suspect not for reason too many to enumerate here. The last section The Effigy seemed hurried, as though the author realized her book was already over 500 pages long and couldn't spend as much time on Essex as she might have. It felt very realistic to me in many ways, as though those conversations had happened and those complex emotional paths were that obvious. This book really brought home to me how incredible Elizabeth was: her mind, her shrewdness and political instinct and what a tightrope she had to walk every minute of her life. Thank you again SantaThing for choosing this wonderful book! ( )

had mixed feelings about this one. The author is an evocative writer and this was a good page turner. But it did veer more towards the romantic end of the historical novel spectrum than I am wholly comfortable with. It committed for me the cardinal sin of depicting Elizabeth and Dudley as having sex, almost casually after years of non-physical romance. I do not think their romance should be seen in modern terms as necessarily involving physical sex and I think if it had the course of events in the Queen's reign and her impact on government and the country would have been different.

I would also say that the author rather exaggerated Elizabeth's lack of enthusiasm for religious persecution in certain situations; while to a degree genuinely not seeking to make a window into men's souls, she is here depicted as having an unrealistically modern agnosticism or even atheism that doesn't fit the facts about her religious upbringing or resistance to trimming to the wind in her sister Mary's reign. Finally, the crowning psychological idea that Elizabeth's execution of the Earl of Essex was symbolic vengeance against all men for the execution of her mother by her father struck me as rather absurd, though I suppose we can never know exactly what psychological effects the trauma of her upbringing and the first 25 years of her life might have had on her reign. 3.5/5 ( )