Now available again, the first book in Robin Maxwell's acclaimed
Elizabethan Quartet: "Wonderfully juicy . . . Maxwell brings all of
bloody Tudor England vividly to life" (Publishers Weekly, starred
review).
One was queen for a thousand days; one for over forty years. Both were
passionate, headstrong women, loved and hated by Henry VIII. Yet until
the discovery of the secret diary, Anne Boleyn and her daughter,
Elizabeth I, had never really met.
Anne was the second of Henry's six wives, doomed to be beloved,
betrayed, and beheaded. When Henry fell madly in love with her upon her
return from an education at the lascivious French court, he was already
a married man. While his passion for Anne was great enough to rock the
foundation of England and of all Christendom, in the end he forsook her
for another love, schemed against her, and ultimately had her sentenced
to death. But unbeknownst to the king, Anne had kept a diary.
At the beginning of Elizabeth 's reign, it is pressed into her hands. In
reading it, the young queen discovers a great deal about her
much-maligned mother: Anne's fierce determination, her hard-won
knowledge about being a woman in a world ruled by despotic men, and her
deep-seated love for the infant daughter taken from her shortly after
her birth.
In the journal's pages, Elizabeth finds an echo of her own dramatic life
as a passionate young woman at the center of England's powerful male
establishment, and with the knowledge gained from them, makes a
resolution that will change the course of history.
