She studied English at the University of Wales before embarking on a thirty-year international business career.

Image: Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland, and her six daughters, from the Neville Book of Hours. Cecily is an absorbing story of a woman who wielded an unusual degree of power behind the scenes in events that shaped the history of England. The Cecily of the book is intelligent, perceptive, ruthless when needed but, most importantly, pragmatic. And I need everyone to read this book so that we can talk endlessly about Cecily and the extraordinary life she lived - or rather, created for herself.No one is perfect, certainly not Cecily, but through all her trials and tribulations she was an amazingly courageous woman to the point fanatism.

Many, many novels have been written about the Wars of the Roses, with the latest tending to focus on the women involved in the wars. I originally didn’t know much about Cecily Neville, but now I feel like I know every heartache and every victory that she experienced. Whilst I have no doubt that Cecily influenced York, let's not forget that York was a talented spinner of PR. It’s an action-packed narrative, with a lot of characters, some who share a name, and plenty who gain and lose titles (there are family trees at the back). Cecily lived to see her eightieth birthday, saw kings and queens come and go, outlived most of her children (including her four sons who lived to adulthood), saw her husband and her brother killed in battle.

Not once did Garthwaite break out into history textbook dryness - a la Sunne in Splendour - to get the reader understanding what was going on. But I was excited because instead of being hailed as the new Philippa Gregory (one is more than enough), Garthwaite was being compared to Hilary Mantel whose writing I just adore. As the novel makes clear, To dzięki tej pasji, temu oddaniu i zainteresowaniu postacią Cecylii Neville oddała czytelnikom realistyczny portret kobiety z krwi i kości, kobiety, która dąży do władzy i władzę niejako zdobywa.

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. It all happened in an era before feminism was a spoken word or even an idea, but you will be amazed to find out how many women played crucial roles in the Wars of the Roses. Rather, it is the fictionalised story of a strong, ruthless and highly intelligent woman who strove as hard as she could to protect and advance the interests of her husband and children — and thereby, of course, herself. I also felt like the repetition of these traits was so constant that the author was trying to show that certain figures, Cecily didn’t consider consequential in her life (although I think Warwick will get more development in the next book) so she just reduces them to one trait. In the Afterword Annie Garthwaite tells us how she became interested in history and on the type of history that interested her.Annie Garthwaite's Cecily Neville--the ambitious, brilliant, fierce, yet deeply vulnerable wife of a duke and mother of a king--is one of the most unforgettable characters I've encountered in literature in a long time. From the opening chapter, in which 16-year-old Cecily - already married for some years to Richard - forces herself to watch the burning of Joan of Arc to prove her husband is loyal to the king in whose name the sentence is carried out, through myriad births and (sadly) far too many infant deaths, and the navigation of the shifting sands of always-changing political alliances, to the final tumultuous scenes, we watch the growth and maturation of a strong and very complex woman through often exquisite, jewel-like prose. I liked that Richard is drawn through her eyes and doesn’t dominate – he’s had all the attention he needs hasn’t he?