Only one man had ever mattered to Matilda, ever since childhood. An empress, a woman who had worn out one aging husband, only to dominate her next, a mere boy, Geoffrey, first of the fiery Plantagenets. Definitely leaning on the side of ridiculousness: The Passionate Enemies has a laughable jacket description. That said, for a deeper insight Sharon Penman's When Christ and His Saints Slept is a weightier tome in more ways than one, Ellis Peters uses the civil war as the background to her Cadfael novels and Helen Castor is excellent in She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth in digging into the huge problems facing a potential Queen in an age when Sovereignty went hand in hand with war. This isn't the worst introduction to this period. There were glimpses of good writing and strong characterisation but these were lost I think in the rush to tell the story, cram all the history in and cover an enormous amount of ground. I could have bought into both had they been better handled. Plaidy is usually reliable on her history but two legends are woven into the fabric of the story - that of her first husband faking his death, thereby casting doubt on Matilda's marriage to Geoffrey of Anjou and that of Stephen and Matilda's relationship. Incredibly melodramatic and occasionally unintentionally hilarious in its depiction of the relationship between Stephen and Matilda as they circle warily but obsessively about each other and the throne.
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