Earlier this month I reviewed Susan Higginbotham’s latest novel, The Queen of Last Hopes. Now it is my great pleasure to introduce to you, one of the queens of historical fiction herself, Susan Higginbotham.
Margaret of Anjou
One of the periods of history that has intrigued me for some time is that of the Wars of the Roses, the collective name given to the series of civil wars that rocked England during the fifteenth century. Naturally, when I began to read—and to write—historical fiction, I soon gravitated toward this era.
As I read more and more Wars of the Roses novels, I began to notice that certain characters were almost always treated in the same manner, whether or not there was any historical basis for their characterizations, and that others were generally either idealized or demonized. One of the characters almost always demonized was Margaret of Anjou, queen to Henry VI. In novel after novel, she’s a sexually promiscuous, insanely vengeful, power-hungry harpy, with no redeeming characteristics except for courage, if she’s allowed even that much.
Popular history has been scarcely kinder to Margaret. In Paul Murray Kendall’s still-influential biography of Richard III, for instance, Margaret (like Elizabeth Woodville, another bête noire of Kendall) is the Evil Queen of fairy tale, as cruel, vicious, and depraved as her enemy Richard, Duke of York (like his son Richard), is selfless, principled, and upright. Any rumor about Margaret that reflects poorly upon her is accepted at face value; any time her motives are in question, the worst are attributed to her.
As I read further, though, I found that some modern historians, less inclined than Kendall to see historical figures, and especially historical women, in terms of black or white, had dug beneath the caricature to reveal a different Margaret, one who like the men of her times had to deal with problems to which there were no simple or satisfactory solutions. Thanks to them, I could at last see Margaret the human being, not Margaret the stereotype—and when I did, I wanted to tell the story of a woman I came deeply to admire.
Neither saint nor she-wolf, the historical Margaret of Anjou was faced with an ineffectual and sometimes mentally ill husband, conflicting claims to the throne, a war with her native France that had begun decades before she was born and that ended in humiliation and disgrace for the English, feuding nobles, and her difficulty in giving her husband a royal heir. Any one of these problems would have been daunting: Margaret had to cope with all of them. It was her courage and tenacity in doing so, even when her cause appeared hopeless, which inspired me to make her the subject of my new novel, The Queen of Last Hopes.
About the Author:
I am the author of two historical novels set in fourteenth-century England: The Traitor’s Wife: A Novel of the Reign of Edward II and Hugh and Bess. Both were reissued in 2009 by Sourcebooks.
My third novel, The Stolen Crown, is set during the Wars of the Roses. It features Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, and his wife, Katherine Woodville, as narrators. My fourth novel, The Queen of Last Hopes, features Margaret of Anjou, queen to Henry VI, and is set mainly in the earlier years of the Wars of the Roses. It was released in January 2011. I’m now working on a novel set during Tudor times.
See Susan Higginbothams Website.
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