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

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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 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. 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) 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.

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. In terms of historical accuracy, I only caught two main things. The first was having Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester in France for the burning of Joan of Arc and Henry VI’s coronation in Paris. He was in England the entire time, he left France in 1422 and didn’t return until 1436 to relieve Calais. He had nothing whatsoever to do with Joan of Arc and he was Regent of England while Henry VI was in France for his coronation. Having said that, I can understand it – these first chapters set up the major figures of Henry VI’s minority and Cecily and York’s relationship with them and the situation with France very well.

And here was I, as usual the odd one out. Since Pa had died, I'd managed to find nothing except a new and more reliable dealer. Even though I was by far the most financially successful sister… what was the point when I hadn't a clue what else I wanted to do?' This is a beautiful memoir about the author written in a diary about how she made her way through the pandemic and coped with grief after losing her cousin, Owen. This cookie is used to a profile based on user's interest and display personalized ads to the users.

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While Richard is released without Cecily’s intervention, the next few years sees open warfare break out between Lancaster and York. As the the royal army is about to descend on York’s stronghold of Ludlow. It is Cecily who tells a reluctant Richard and their sons that they must flee. Again, it is Cecily who points out the obvious that both of York’s heirs must not stay with Richard. The choice of which one must be hers. “She thinks of her brother outwitting the queen’s army not a month ago at Blore Heath, first to enter the streets at St. Albans, holding the North and always winning. She looks from him to Richard, and knows. She clenches her fists against her sons’ leather gambesons and pushes them both away. ‘Edward, go with your uncle.’” (Really—poor Richard as a completely witless failure? Splitting up Richard and his immediate heir is surely the obvious move.)

Shines a light into a dark corner of our history and reclaims the voice and story of a powerful and forgotten woman' LIZ HYDER, author of The Gifts Or this, on the way she wants to engage with viewers. “It sounds like I’m a sadist, but I want that feeling of never quite knowing. The danger is that it ends up being a frustrating game. What I want is to find that moment where you’ve said it, although not completely, but you’ve said enough that you are rewarded for looking.” In 'Cecily', debut author Annie Garthwaite offers a vivid retelling of the first stages of the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses, through the eyes of Cecily, Duchess of York - wife to Richard, Duke of York, mother to two kings, and one of the few major players to live through and bear witness to the entire conflict.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. This book was good. Enjoyable and entertaining, a solid 3.5 stars. In short, a very well-researched and gripping account of Cecily's life, but one that I just wanted more from. A surprisingly interesting and enjoyable read. Cecily Neville was an English noblewoman in the 1400s. Her family were central figures in the Wars of the Roses and she was the mother of two kings (Edward IV and Richard III).

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." 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.”Brief history recap for anyone unaware: Cecily Neville was a descendant of King Edward III; the wife of a would-be king, Richard of York; and the mother of two actual kings, Edward IV and Richard III. She was a powerful matriarch during the Wars of the Roses; someone always at the very heart of the Yorkist cause. What a subject for a novel! Her candid truth about COVID. For the better part of eighteen months, we’ve all been acting like COVID interrupted our life. In a lot of ways, it did; but in others, it wasn’t an interruption as much as it was a multiplier. Rather than substituting one lifestyle for another (one day I work from the office and the next I work from home), Cecily showed how COVID compounded the challenges that we were dealing with when COVID hit (in her case, grief and loss). Rather than it being a distraction, it just added unimaginable complication to the baggage we were already dealing with. It made life exponentially more messy — making the hard things harder while suffocating any of the coping mechanisms that were helping us get by. It was the saltiest salt in some already festering wounds. While I don’t mean to patronize her story, I really hope that 200 years from now, anthropologists find a copy of this book to understand what it felt like trying to survive a global pandemic. A thirty-year international business career made me even more interested in women’s relationship with power. You can imagine. Let’s just say, I frequently found myself the only woman at the big table. This cookie is set by the provider mookie1.com. This cookie is used for serving the user with relevant content and advertisement. Scope: When I first started out with this story, I expected the main focus to be on the later period of Cecily's life - when she is the mother of two kings and grandmother of a third. But I was actually pleasantly surprised to find out that Garthwaite had chosen to focus solely on the period in Cecily's life before she was raised so high in the world. Here, we get the story of the end War of the Roses as seen through the eyes of one women who was probably closest to the action - and perhaps a greater part of it than anyone of us will ever know.