Author(s): Maria Pery

World Biography & Memoirs | Secondhand

Secondhand.

"Orator, wit, stylist and Queen Elizabeth Tudor was one of the most prolific writers of the golden age bearing her name. Few people realise that her first book was published when she was fourteen and a half years old by John Bale, a controversial heretic whose works had been banned in England by Elizabeth's father, King Henry VIIl. After this unorthodox literary début, she wrote, studied or translated something most days of her life, exceptions being made for 'holydays and hunting'.

Her writing is often brisk, vivid and entertaining. Many of her letters are as lively now as the day they were penned. She wrote and spoke French and Italian almost as fluently as English. She also wrote poems, prayers and graffiti. She was deprived of writing materials while under house arrest at Woodstock; when she was unjustly suspected of treason in her sister Mary's reign, Elizabeth defiantly inscribed a couplet on a window pane with a diamond. She could speak extempore Latin that would put a university chancellor to shame, and, to the delight of her assembled courtiers, she spontaneously denounced an ambassador in that language when she was over sixty.

Educated, she could, when she chose, hide plain meaning in great swathes of ambiguity, although she detested the language of lawyers and often ridiculed their long-windedness. Her speeches became more elaborate as she grew older. The Renaissance prose of her later years would not be everyone's idea of bedtime reading, and for this book, it has been necessary to make a selection of her words rather than a collection. Some documents have also been abridged. But the source material is marvellous, and studied in sequence, her writings have ghosted themselves into a posthumous autobiography, which I hope will interest both historians and lovers of the English language. "

A near-fine copy with VG slipcase. Light fading and mark on the spine.