Cecily: An epic feminist retelling of the War of the Roses

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And from time to time the action comes to Cecily, or she travels to it - and these visitations offer some of the most vivid, moving, heartrending, uplifting or downright triumphant moments in a mesmerizing book. This is why I never miss the chance to sing Jarman’s praises no matter how often she defames my favourites or busts out with her extreme Richardianism. This book is about a powerful, ambitious and intelligent woman who broke tradition in so many ways, she took risks to protect and advance her family and I was absolutely sucked into this book from the very first page. The story is very relatable because it covers her younger years, her marriage to Richard, Duke of York, her happy years with him, their children.

Cecily Neville was one of the most intelligent women of her generation, driven by ambition and by the awareness of her status among the nobles. With the way this book is written, the way it had to be written because of the historical timeline, it could have felt more like non-fiction or like a letter in some cases but it didn’t, it was engaging and fluid. Marguerite is often portrayed the House of Lancaster’s warrior queen; why couldn’t Cecily have played a similar role for the House of York? The first Battle of Saint Albans is all about York getting justice and the violence and intimidation of Henry VI are just brushed under the carpet while Margaret of Anjou’s army are all rapists, plunderers and brutes who are a terrifying threat to all that encounter them (a narrative that is unevidenced, cf. At home, power-hungry men within a corrupt government manipulate a weak king - and name Cecily's husband, York's loyal duke, an enemy.

Richard and Cecily do all that they can to hold English lands in France, brokering deals with the Dukes of Burgundy and Orleans, committing their own funds to pay the soldiers and compensate the townsfolk. She also appears to have chosen her timeline well enough to not give us ‘as you know bobs’, with the main characters digest the aftermath of each news and council meeting as they came. I’ll say it again - too often authors not particularly well versed in the cultural-literary-artistic side of this era, try their hand at constipated purple prose in an attempt to create atmosphere. I’m not named after a famous Cecily from history of fiction, but after my maternal grandmother, who died in a car accident when my father was in his teens. It would also fit in more neatly with how Garthwaite’s Cecily and York view Gloucester after his death.

Cecily despises unequal marriages and feels nothing but scorn when Jacquetta, the widow of the duke of Bedford, marries the pretty golden boy Woodville; a marriage to which the groom can only bring his good looks. No one is perfect, certainly not Cecily, but through all her trials and tribulations she was an amazingly courageous woman to the point fanatism. Her family were central figures in the Wars of the Roses and she was the mother of two kings (Edward IV and Richard III). Genuine authenticity imo is almost impossible to achieve in this genre without a rich background in the literature and culture of this era (not to mention Catholic religiosity). With her husband, the Duke of York, alternatively at the heart of or banished to the margins of the political realm under the wavering King Henry VI - and the machinations of his intriguingly drawn consort, Marguerite of Anjou - politics also reaches into the bedroom, not just the solar or the great hall.I am fond of Gloucester so the “barking bully” characterisation was never going to please me even if it has become common in the work of historians working to redeem the Beauforts. It’s an action-packed narrative, with a lot of characters, some who share a name, and plenty who gain and lose titles (there are family trees at the back). Despite having no real historical knowledge of the time I felt the events were really well explained and easy enough to follow along. She sits halfway between modern-medieval in all things: characterisation, prose, plot arcs etc so we don’t end up with an awkward pastiche that reads like a bodice-ripper. This might involve a little modern wishful thinking - or maybe not: a real proto-feminist text, The City of Ladies, by Christine de Pizan, is mentioned a couple of times.

What a time to live, with so much to win and lose in Royal court, battle and family power struggles. A fast paced retelling of the war of the roses with Cecily Duchess of York as its formidable protagonist.Their story is of love and talk as they navigate the treacherous waters of the mid fifteenth century.