She Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth [Hardcover]

Elizabeth I is one of England's best known reigning queens. Though she was not the first, she set the standard and is widely regarded as a successful ruling monarch. But there were women who ruled, or attempted to rule, England before Elizabeth. There was Matilda, daughter of Henry I, whose cousin got to the throne first; there was Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had plenty of power in her own domains but in many respects is best known for her husbands and sons; there was Isabella, wife of Edward II, who seized a throne for herself in the name of her son; there was Margaret of Anjou, who fought ferociously to maintain her son's right to the throne; and there were Jane and Mary, Elizabeth's immediate predecessors. Castor looks at these women and how they ruled and examines the pattern of English thought and how it changed over more than 400 years of history.

I loved this book. I didn't expect anything less; I gushed about Helen Castor's Blood and Roses a couple of years ago, so it's no surprise that I couldn't wait a second to get my hands on this one. None of these women were new to me as a person obsessed with medieval history, but Castor puts their stories together in a way that makes perfect sense. She looks not only at what happened to each woman and how successful she was at ruling, but what people thought about it and how England became a country that could accept a female monarch.

It's no surprise that they have almost universally been vilified at one point or another. The medieval interpretation of what it meant to be female and the medieval interpretation of what it meant to be king were completely incompatible. As Castor says in the first section, focusing on Matilda, she just could not win. If she exercised the right of a king, the power necessary to be successful, she was an unnatural woman, but if she didn't, there was simply no way for her to rule. She could not be a success in her contemporaries' eyes, no matter what she did - at least, not until she started to fight on behalf of her son, Henry.

And the story is the same for many of the women, with incremental changes. Attitudes do take hundreds of years to change, and while the kingdom was changing, the status of women didn't go very far towards changing with it. All of the royal power women were actually able to hold in England had to be in the name of a man, even if that man was actually a baby. It's a fascinating exploration of the very different challenges each women faced while at the same time putting together the universality of their condition.

And it's perfectly appropriate that they lead up to Elizabeth, because she was the game changer, who ruled in her own name, with her own wisdom, and did a fantastic job. There's no question that women continued to struggle for rights, and they suffered considerably for centuries, in some respects still doing so. But a number of factors contributed towards her doing so, and she must have felt a kinship towards the women who came before and the strides they made to earn power for women in the English kingdom.

Castor treats all of the women with an even hand, taking a steady look at what was expected of them as women rulers, why they got treated the way they did, and even whether or not they deserved it. Isabella, for example, can easily be dismissed as a poor ruler, but we can also understand why she acted the way she did (at least as far as overthrowing her husband) and the results of those actions in a wider context. While there is still a lot about the men in these women's lives, they were the actual monarchs and thus had a very large role to play in defining the positions of their mothers, daughters, and wives, so it doesn't feel as though the women have vanished inside the shadows of the better-recorded lives of the men.

In short, She-Wolves is exceptional, inspirational, and endlessly fascinating. If you're interested in history, especially that of women, this book is unquestionably for you.

Helen Castor's study of queenship and power is a absorbing and gripping read. Narrated with a light and easy style this looks at the exercise of power by English queens; used as we are to history with the successful reigns of two Elizabeths and a Victoria it is easy to forget that this was not always so.

Beginning with the death of the fifteen year old Edward V1, son of King Henry of the many wives fame, and ending with the first successful queen regnant, Elizabeth Tudor, Helen Castor examines four examples of English queens who attempted to rule as well as reign.

As all four of the subjects of this book, Matilda, lady of the English, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of Valois and Margaret of Anjou, found, it was entirely acceptable to exercise power as the delegate or adjunct of a ruling male, but to attempt to do so in her own right was anathema for a woman. Nowhere is this made clearer than in the (male) chronicler's account of the 11th century struggle for power between Matilda, the legal heiress of England's crown and the Matilda, wife to King Stephen who carried out the fight for her imprisoned husband. Matilda, attempting to rule in her own right was described disapprovingly as unbearably proud and haughty while the other Matilda was warmly commended for " forgetting the weakness of her sex and a woman's softness, she bore herself with the valour of a man" .

I especially enjoyed the sections devoted to Margaret of Anjou and Matilda, Empress and Queen as I knew very little about them before.But what gripped me most was the little, telling details so often overlooked by other biographers and which bring their subjects to life with an touching immediacy. In the short opening section devoted to King Edward Tudor, I learnt of his wistful letters to his former companion Barnaby Fitzpatrick, that the Easter before he died Edward was treated to a spectacle of a danse macabre and that abandoned by all who had risen to power through him, he died in the arms of another boyhood friend, Henry Sidney.

Helen Castor demonstrates impeccable scholarship and a gripping narrative drive. Without doubt this is one of the best biographies I have read in quite a long while.

I bought this hardback on the strength of it being one of Hilary Mantel's 'books of the year' as a gift for a friend. The postal crisis in the run up to Christmas meant it arrived too late to gift so I read it myself.

I always suspect, when a famous author gives an endorsement to another's work, that the quality of the relationship between the two can influence the accuracy of the recommendation. On this occasion I was right to trust Hilary Mantel's judgement. Helen Castor's work is a genuine page turner. She truly does have a narrative gift.

Having been raised on the Tudors I was always a bit woolly about the order and nature of the monarchs before them. This book renders the characters involved so vividly that the -sometimes intricate -family trees finally start to make sense.

I really came to marvel at the abilities of the four great women this work elucidates. The dynastic marriages and betrothals at ridiculously young ages, the active and passive roles they played in European powerplay and diplomacy, the vagaries of conceptions and pregnancies in a pre-medical era. What they endured and overcame can only be guessed at by modern women.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. So much so that it's really reawakened my appetite for history. The scholarship in its creation is really impressive - as evidenced by the extremely comprehensive bibliography. I recommend it wholeheartedly.