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

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It will take all of Cecily's courage and cunning to save her family. But when the will to survive becomes ambition for a crown, will she risk treason to secure it?

Judging by the actual technical skill of the writing, it’s awesome. The prose is gorgeous. It does something sound more “modern” than I’d expect a historical novel to but those moments are relatively few. Garthwaite’s writing is evocative and illuminative. But it’s also matched by a tight, tense plot that verges into a political thriller. It’s a compelling, taut read. I took it more slowly than I could have because I wanted to savour the book but I could’ve read this book within a day or two. There are genuinely harrowing, emotional moments – I was moved to tears, I had a pit in my stomach. I took photos of some passages so I could keep rereading them.

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The novel takes the reader into the world of Cecily plunging them into the closed bedchambers and bloody battlefields of the first days of the Wars of the Roses, a war as women fight it.

But maybe, she suggests, the worst year of your life can also be the best year of your life. I really hope so, for all of us.There are times when one may feel a little distant from the 'action', which perhaps is only to be expected when one is reading a woman's point of view on what is very much a politics-and-battles era of 'traditional' history (as opposed to 'herstory'), with some major incidents related through messenger or letter, when Cecily herself wasn't/couldn't be present. Yet there can be action aplenty in the 'domestic' sphere too, especially when, as in Cecily's world, the domestic sphere is so close to the political. 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. 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. What can I say? I love 15th century history. No apologies, no excuses. The 100 Years War. The Wars of the Roses. All of that. 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...

The book opens in 1431 as Cecily witnesses the burning to death of Joan d’Arc and later the crowning of the young King Henry VI of England as King of France, although his realm does not extend to the whole of France and a rival, King Charles of France, also claims that title. Cecily Brown hasn’t always found it easy to talk about her art. “There was a time in the early 1990s in England where you basically felt like people at a party would turn away if you said you were a painter,” says the British-born, New York-based artist in her new Contemporary Artist Series monograph. “People would constantly say ‘Oh, why are you a painter?’, and you had to defend it all the time. There was this idea that if you were a painter it was because you had an unquestioning belief in painting’s power, rather than that it just happened to be a medium that you wanted to employ and that you felt you could still use to say something.” This cookie is set by the provider mookie1.com. This cookie is used for serving the user with relevant content and advertisement. Consider these thoughts, on the artistic debt she owes to her novelist mother. “My painting is really close to my mum’s writing. The very visual nature of her writing, its surreal nature, had a big influence on me.” The memoir is told in a series of diary-like entries where Strong splays heart and guts open for the reader to comb through with her. She discusses her grief of losing her cousin to brain cancer while being terribly isolated and alone in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, and while the reader can *feel* the loneliness, we simultaneously feel like we're with her the whole way.I also dealt with grief in 2020 and it did make the pandemic all the more scary and lonely. It still does. Losing someone is very hard, especially when you convinced yourself it would not happen. When you believed it would all be okay and it turns out that it isn't. I wouldn't say I "enjoyed" this connection to her words, but somehow it helps to know you were not and are not alone in those thoughts and feelings. I hope you enjoy getting to know the seven sisters in this series, each of them different and remarkable in their own way. Just like in life, you're bound to identify with a particular sister more than the others, but that's the part of the fun. And some sisters might even surprise you . . . 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.

A first time author has had her debut novel CECILY published after a successful launch on Tuesday at Ludlow Castle.

This cookie is used to a profile based on user's interest and display personalized ads to the users. Another summer gives up the coin of its brightness, until the wind-torn colours of autumn fly… and the first frosts come shivering in to gild its trees in counterfeit silver.” 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. Or this, on the freedom she found after crossing the Atlantic. “The big change for me was that in America, people seemed a lot more relaxed about what you could and couldn’t do. Yes. As an artist. In America they’d already moved on. People had figured out that you could still paint. The conversation just felt totally different when I first came here.”