Thank you to NetGalley and Orion Publishing Group for this ARC.

This is the story of Queen Margaret of England, wife of Lancastrian King Henry VI, and Anne Beauchamp, Countess of Warwick, wife of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, also called the Kingmaker, who famously switched allegiance from York to Lancaster to further himself and lost his head in the process. Throughout the book, they sent each other letters, but they were full of barbs as they behaved like cruel toddlers. There was hardly female friendship here and yet they continued to correspond. I don't know whether they did in real life but I seriously doubt it.

Gosh, this isn't a cheerful book. It's almost exclusively about how women had no agency and suffered extreme tragedies at the hands of men who left them powerless and penniless. Women were not allowed to participate in war, religion or politics, the three main topics of the time. They and their inheritance were seen as a man's property and their fate was either as a wife and mother, or as a nun in a convent. Even Queen Margaret who basically ruled England for a while, could only do so because her husband Henry was weak and allowed her to, even though she lacked neither the ability nor the confidence.

Today we decry arranged marriages, back then they were the norm, at least in aristocratic circles where the accumulation of and holding on to wealth and titles was more important than anything. Women had no role to play, no influence to exert but as wife of a traitor they were considered guilty too. Talk about injustice! 

This is, as ever, meticulously researched but I have read about the historical political context and the backdrop of the War of the Roses better elsewhere. I was more interested in a woman's life back then but everything they did or thought was because of a man's actions in a world where betrayal and treason seemed to be the norm. 

Much is made about Johane de Geneville, who was the subject of the author's previous book, being the great great grandmother of Anne Beauchamp. It looks like a lot of history did repeat itself throughout hundreds of years which is not a cheerful thought.

Those women might have been strong-willed but it didn't really help them in a world dominated by male power games. Also, I know there was plenty of story go get through but I would have wished for a tightening that got it under 400 pages. Still, I enjoyed reading about women history deemed not important enough and who come to life here.