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

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Image: Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland, and her six daughters, from the Neville Book of Hours. Cecily is wearing a golden gown, with green patterns. ( Source and another) For me, the stand out character of the 15th century has always been Cecily Neville. She experienced power in both directions; wielding it and having it wielded against her. She survived eighty years of tumultuous history, mothered kings, created a dynasty and brought her family through civil war. She met victory and defeat in equal measure and, in face of all, lived on. Last woman standing, you might say. Cecily stayed close to the centre of power through 80 years of tumultuous British history: mothering two kings, bearing twelve children, burying all but two, surviving beyond her house’s ruin. For a woman at any time she is remarkable. For a woman during the 15th century, she is extraordinary. As with York, I kept thinking there was something missing with him. He was too passive, too noble, too good, too unambitious. There is a common trope to view York as the man driven by nobility and what is “right” who can’t survive in a court of snakes (similar to “Good Duke Humphrey” in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI, Part 2 or Ned Stark in A Game of Thrones), but I have never been convinced by it and Garthwaite doesn’t sell it here either. Annie Garthwaite writes about the past with the sort of intimacy, immediacy and empathy that can only come from graft and craft' TOBY CLEMENTS, author of Kingmaker

The cookie is set by rlcdn.com. The cookie is used to serve relevant ads to the visitor as well as limit the time the visitor sees an and also measure the effectiveness of the campaign. Perfect for a trivia night or a long trip, #TrainTeasers will both test your knowledge of this country`s rail system and enlighten you on the most colourful aspects of its long history. Meet trunk murderers, trainspotters, haters of railways, railway writers, Ministers for Transport good and bad, railway cats, dogs and a railway penguin. This is NOT a book for number-crunching nerds. Many of the answers are guessable by the intelligent reader. It is a quiz, yes, but also a cavalcade of historical incident and colour relating to a system that was the making of modern Britain. This cookie is used to recognize the visitor upon re-entry. This cookie allows to collect information on user behaviour and allows sharing function provided by Addthis.com Finished in a day but not because I was riveted. I like Cecily strong and think she’s probably the most underrated current cast member. But this read like a stream of conscious diary without a lot of consideration for her audience. It reminded me of having someone talk at me, name dropping aunts and uncles or friends from their past without really giving these names any context to a person who does not know these people. Image: Ludlow Castle, where Cecily remained, with her children, when her husband had to flee. ( Source)There are so many things I am feeling right now as I think about this book. I had no idea it would be so deep and yet also uplifting at times. While this book is about grief and the loss of Cecily's cousin Owen, she touches on so much more, opening up painful parts of her life in ways most of us will never be brave enough to do. Cecily did a wonderful job honoring her cousin Owen with this book, but she also honors herself by speaking truth about her own life.

I love this type of feminist historical fiction, and this certainly doesn't disappoint. Cecily is a fascinating figure. We meet her at the execution of Joan of Arc and we instantly start to understand what life is like for women, how high the stakes are, and the strength of character of our protagonist. The fact that her life stretched from the death of Joan of Arc to the birth of Henry viii is amazing to me. She also gets very real about her relationships with her family and with significant others. She doesn't stay on the surface, she tells it like it was, like it is, and I admire her so much for putting that out there. The way she had relationships that weren't the best, but they had moments in them that mattered and they will stay with her, even though she couldn't stay with them.To turn to Cecily as an interpretation of historical events, I was again impressed. A lot of novels I’ve read about this particular time period – the end of the Hundred Years War, the beginning of the Wars of the Roses – tend to focus mainly on the origins of the Wars of the Roses and deal with the Hundred Years War as something to be gotten through to get to the “good stuff”, even though the failures in France were what undermined Henry VI’s reign and his favourites. Happily, Garthwaite doesn’t do this – the Hundred Years War sections are dealt with marvellously and the weight of the history behind them helps to contribute to the frustrations with Henry and his court. It’s not that I’m a big fan of blood and battles. Personally I can do without that sort of thing. No. It’s the women who interest me. How they negotiated their way in the world. How they managed – some of them at least, probably more than you’d think – to wield power and influence at a time when men seemed to hold most of the cards. And how others, simply, didn't. The vulnerability and rawness of Strong's memoir is exactly as striking as any of her performances, and as a fan of hers, as well as Saturday Night Live, I don't say this lightly. Strong's book intermingles the crippling reality of anxiety and depression, intermingled with long-ago stories of her youth, not-so-long-ago stories of her blossoming romance, and just-a-minute-ago stories of her heartbreak as loss after loss rips through her in what she calls the worst year of her life. The Cecily of the book is intelligent, perceptive, ruthless when needed but, most importantly, pragmatic. As she says at one point, ‘When it’s impossible to do a thing, you must simply find a way to make it happen’. Unfortunately that advice, given in a generous spirit, is ultimately turned against her. It’s the same unflinching pragmatism that sees her marry off her six-year-old daughter, Anne, to Henry Holland. ‘She will do it for a dukedom and for ever closer ties to the old royal house, for the network of affinity that will keep York strong.’ Velvet on velvet… It seems the scents of an Italian summer are trapped in its folds, or that, by some magic, the tiny marguerites patterned in its alternating depths carry the perfume of true flowers.”

While this was a great historical fiction novel that had clearly been deeply researched, I would say that this book is maybe not for people like me, who do not have much knowledge of the royal line. I’d recommend this book to people who are interested in the war of the roses, who already know the main players, and want to see things from Cecily’s perspective. As she learns about her heritage in Kenya, she is inspired by the life of Cecily Huntley-Morgan, a New York socialite who finds herself thrown into Kenya's decadent ‘Happy Valley' set during the Second World War. At a crossroads in her life, Electra knows she must face up to her addictions. It is only when she opens her heart to people who truly care about her that she discovers where her

Books by Cecily Gayford

Being in nature made me feel alive, made my senses sharpen and soar, as if I was rising above the earth and becoming part of the universe. Here at Kinnaird, I knew that the inner part of me that I hid from the world could blossom and grow…' This Cecily Neville is ambitious and politically astute; capable and influential. She is a political animal first and foremost. She and her husband, Richard, the third Duke of York are a well-matched pair, equal partners in love, politics and war. Even their pillow talk is dominated by their political plans. They will establish two administrative centers: Ludlow in the west with its vast revenues from their Mortimer estates and Fotherinhay in the east to manage their English holdings. In each place, Cecily tells her husband, they will build a church as “great engines of prayer for the house York.” And Cecily’s duty is to bear children—the coins of her purse—to build the house. England has been fighting France for 100 years. At home, power-hungry men within a corrupt government manipulate a weak king - and name Cecily's husband, York's loyal duke, an enemy. As the king's grasp on sanity weakens, plots to destroy York take root... Garthwaite has this incredible skill for being able to draw these incredibly detailed, memorable character sketches with only a few words or lines. I found myself constantly amazed by the sheer scope of the novel, the epic cast and how much Garthwaite was able to make me feel for them especially when some only appear sporadically. Although I might wish that my (relatively) obscure favourite of the 15th century appeared a little more in Garthwaite’s novel, I also have to say Garthwaite has written by far the best depiction of Eleanor Cobham’s penance walk I’ve ever read.

The cookie is set by CasaleMedia. The cookie is used to collect information about the usage behavior for targeted advertising. BLOODY GREAT. So modern, so political, it could almost be set in Downing Street' KATE SAWYER, author of The Stranding Cecily: Of course I was instantly obsessed with Cecily. I loved how Garthwaite chose to portray her. I loved the role she was afforded - not only in her own story but in the history of the Wars of the Roses and the eventual victory of her son. Garthwaite gave Cecily such autonomy, strength of character, tenacity and willpower it was a pleasure to read this version of her. I would never myself have imagined Cecily as this type of woman, but after reading this, I think it was mainly because no one else has ever given Cecily any sort of character as all. This version was both refreshing and necessary.

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There were so many beautiful passages about grief in this book. On April 17th, 2020, the author wrote, "Do you also cry yourself to sleep? So often, I keep approaching okay, but I'm never fully there. I'll only ever be okay-adjacent. I'm everything-adjacent because words are hard to find these days. I'm living life-adjacent right now." There is not much more to say about the plot per se. Although, I do recommend this book for anyone who wants to see RoY’s Irish lieutenancy in prose. I have no complaints about how the Irish situations was portrayed and these segments (though too few) were my absolute favourite parts. I also have great admiration for how the author managed to convey to the reader, throughout, a sense of how and why the tensions between RoY and HVI’s circle had so escalated by the beggining of the 1460s. The portrayal of this was chalk-full with history, recounting each and every minor event and external cause and their significance; painting a robust cause and effect chain for the reader to understand how the hot-war, we all know with great clarity, came to be. I believe the author’s greatest feat was managing to interweave information into the narrative by showing and never telling. I’m serious when I call this a feat. Not once did Garthwaite break out into history textbook dryness - a la Sunne in Splendour - to get the reader understanding what was going on. 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. Could the prose being in present-tense have helped? I wonder. Although it was quite a gamble as it may have cost the novel in atmosphere (more on that later). This was a time when the sons and daughters of noble houses were married in childhood in pursuit of dynastic alliances, although such marriages may not be consummated until some years later. Indeed, Cecily was only nine years old herself when she was joined in marriage with Richard Plantagenet.