Book Review Catch-Up! "The Life of Elizabeth I" by Alison Weir

[megwrites]

Title: The Life of Elizabeth I
Author: Alison Weir (AlisonWeir.org.uk)
Genre: Non-fiction (Biography)
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Ballantine




Basic Plotline Premise: Weir's biography follows the life of Elizabeth I from her younger years before she ascended the throne through her rise to power and her reign over England to her death.


The Positives: If you follow my reviews, you know that I am a decided fan of Alison Weir's histories and the way she constructs a solid narrative of both the events and personages that take place at a time in history so as it make both the event and the causes of it apparent.

The best feature of Weir's biography of Elizabeth I is that she does not come with an automatic sense of reverence or a need to overly flatter Elizabeth. She clearly shows a woman who did very well with what she was given, but who had her own deep flaws and shortcomings both as a woman and a ruler. In some ways, Weir is more critical of the queen than praising, which is to the book's advantage.

Weir points out that while Elizabeth did her best to restore England from the massive debt that her sister's reign had plunged it into, she also balances that with a portrait of a court and system that was deeply corrupt - something that Elizabeth neither could nor would do anything about during her life time - and a woman who regularly employed deception as a means of keeping control but who had an unfortunate jealousy and need for flattery, an insecurity to go along with all her strengths.

Weir also does creates something of a nail biter, which is a very hard thing to do with a history that is so familiar to so many. She deftly displays the constant suspense and waffling Elizabeth undertook to keep her courtiers, lords, amabassadors and foreign princes guessing as to whether she would marry or whom she would marry.

She manages to lay out a story with its own drama, it's own highs and lows, without making the ending a foregone conclusion.

The research is impeccable and I admire that Weir uses several sources and, as usual, is transparent in comparing competing theories of history and making measured, careful judgments about the plausibility of each. She does not expect any one source to be completely reliable, but rather takes the totality of several sources, always keeping their validity in mind when weighing them.

Oddly enough, I think the best moments in the book were the ones in which Weir manages to make the reader feel as exasperated with Elizabeth's constant back-and-forth wiles and deceptiveness as her courtiers must certainly have felt.


The Negatives: There's isn't a lot terribly negative about this book to point out.

There is some repetitiveness to the narration, places where Weir reiterates and summarizes some of Elizabeth's personality with statements that were made a lot clearer simply from reading of Elizabeth's actions and words.

My other complaint, which is minor, is the armchair psychology Weir engages in when trying to explain to the reader why Elizabeth so flatly refused not only to marry, but to take a sexual partner. While I agree that Elizabeth was, in all probability, chaste for the majority of her life and certainly during her reign, Weir's theory that Elizabeth would equate sex and marriage with death fails to take into account a lot of the social, cultural, and religious pressure Elizabeth would have been under, from childhood, to know that her place was to marry and be a mother.

Furthermore, I do not think that a woman who so deftly used subtle sexuality, romantic overtures, and her own allure as a woman as an administrative tool would have such a simplistic view of sex, marriage, and death.

I think it is far more plausible that what Elizabeth feared was not some half-Freudian subconscious notion that sex and death were interlinked, but rather than she very practically feared the consequences of allowing another human being with a political agenda to have power over her. I think Weir would have been more accurate in surmising that Elizabeth's reluctance to marry was a reluctance to surrender power, which was her only means of securing her safety. Keeping herself as the sole ruler of England meant that she could not become the pawn of a husband who would become king and might well dispose of her, especially if she could not bear a child - which given her family history (a mother and half-sister both who suffered from gynecological problems, miscarriages and tumors respectively) and her age at ascendency (twenty-five, which was considered a bit old for marriage back then) was a distinct possibility.



CoC Score: 0. No characters of color in this book.

Gender Score: 10. A complex, intricate portrait of a complex woman, written by a woman. While Elizabeth did surround herself with men, Weir is careful to keep in mind the other women in her life.

GLBT Score: 0. No significant GLBT people or issues in this book. There is a mention of a possible suitor early in Elizabeth's reign who was rumored to be bisexual, but other than that it focuses mainly on Elizabeth's heterosexuality.

Comments

[wisdomeagle]

I love reading your reviews. :)

So I've been thinking about the numerical ratings at the end, and how books with, say, no queer characters or themes, e.g., this one, get lower scores (0) than books that have overtly homophobic plotlines (which get a low numerical ranking).

I'm torn, because there's the question of, "Should there be?" Should there be any CoC in some given book? Sometimes the answer is clearly yes - if it's set in contemporary urban USA, then there absolutely should be characters of color, and if there aren't, that's a problem, and it seems like a 0 (no characters of color) is insufficient to convey the "oops, you failed" quality of that. OTOH, a book set in the Civil War south without any GLBT characters probably gets a pass, and a "0, no GLBT characters" is sufficient.

It's possible you've been distinguishing this numerically somehow that I have failed to observe? What are your thoughts?

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you like my reviews! I hope I'm not spamming people's f-lists with them too terribly much.

I've thought about this issue myself and that's why I try to have a little blurb of explanation after the numbers instead of just a numerical score. Your concerns are absolutely well founded and I'm glad you're bringing them up. It's a damn good question.

For some books, there's a good reason why there may not be any characters/issues of a certain category. I don't expect to see, for instance, a lot of CoC's in a history about 10th century Wales, so I'd give that a plain zero.

But for books that are set in, say, 2000's NYC and have no CoC's - then I'd give a zero, but I'd also include an explanation of why I think that was really problematic on the author's part.

When I was coming up with my scoring system, I realized that giving a bad score to a book with a legitimate reason not to have CoC/GLBT/female etc characters would sort of lessen the impact of giving a bad score to a book that really WAS problematic. The zero score is meant to be there so I can indicate that there's a lack of that content and then I can explain whether it's a good zero or a bad zero in the blurb.

I wanted the numerical scores to be there for content that did exist textually in the book and for good/bad I thought it was.

And it still sort of gets tangled for me. Because while I might be able to handwave a lack of CoC's in Elizabethan England because of historical happenstance, I know for a fact queerness did exist and was part of life for them. There were many instances of well known (or commonly supposed) queer people and not just gay or lesbian. There were, as I said, certain people know to be bisexual or transgender (one prince was known to want to be a woman and to, in private, dress himself in women's clothing and take a female name). How much should I expect an author to discuss these things when talking about Elizabeth I and court life? If an author uses historical evidence to try to say a person wasn't queer, is that erasure or is that just looking at the evidence?

So I do keep questioning my scores and my scoring and I'm really glad when other people bring the topic up, because the better I get at examining things in other's writings, the higher I can raise my awareness and hopefully reflect that in not only my future reading by my future writing as well.

[nwhyte]

I read this one just over a year ago, as part of my general interest in the sixteenth century. It is pretty clear to me that Elizabeth was abused by her stepfather as a teenager, and that gives Weir's psycho-sexual speculations more foundation. Though certainly she would also have been making the political calculations about marriage which you mention, and I certainly wouldn't want to imply that survivors of such abuse can never themselves marry.

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

Having read your response, I suppose I should clarify that I completely agree that Elizabeth was the victim of her stepfather's sexual abuses and it definitely had an impact on her and probably contributed toward her aversion toward physical intimacy.

However, what I disagree with is Weir's assertion that any such metaphor would have been that clearly delineated in Elizabeth's mind or that she would have come to the conclusion that sex and marriage lead to death. I think her aversion was not so much based in fear for her life as in a repulsion for the physical act and the desire not to vest too much power in any one man by giving herself to him.