Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford—grandmother to the White Princess. When I started my research, there was no biography of her at all. I had to find her through her husbands, her family, and by tracing he...
It is luck to love someone who is free to love you in return. But I don’t. I just desire him, desire him and desire him; and I wait for it to burn out. Everything I have ever gained has always turned...
In truth, I did not have to wonder. She would be feeling that disturbing mixture of emotions that she always summoned from me: admiration and envy, pride and a furious rivalry, a longing to see a belo...
If a writer believes that women do nothing, then he will have to fantasize about their lives to make a good story. If a writer believes that women are weak, rivalrous, and moody, then she will produce...
Ideas are more dangerous than an unsheathed sword in this world, half of them are forbidden, the other half would lead a man to question the very place of the earth itself, safe at the center of the u...
I want my honour to be about me as a person, not me as an object with boundaries and gateways, as if I were a field – someone can touch my hand, someone can see my face, someone else can’t even speak...
I listen with the air of an eager disciple as he propounds things that I have thought ever since I began my studies. Now he is glancing into books that I have read and hidden for my own safety, and he...
I know I am a better woman than her. She’s ice and ambition, and she would see you on the gallows before surrendering her ambition. And I know that in me he has a lover who loves him for himself. But...
I have to tell you, you have to know: I have loved you honorably as a knight should do his lady, and I have loved you passionately as a man might a woman; and now, before I leave you, I want to tell y...
I have learned the power of surviving.
I had meant my promise to George. I had said that I was, before anything else, a Boleyn and a Howard through and through; but now, sitting in th shadowy room, looking out over the gray slates of the c...
I can’t sleep, he says so quietly that only I can hear. I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep. Nor I. You neither? No. Truly? Yes. He sighs a deep sigh, as if he is relieved. Is this love then?...
I am too dark in my heart tonight.
I am a woman who makes things happen, and I am not defeated yet. I am not defeated by a boy with a newly won crown, and no man will ever walk away from me certain that he won't walk back.
Historical fiction is a hybrid, a blending of reported reality, reasonable speculation, psychological truth, and the author’s imagination.
His little gestures of affection, his hand in the small of her aching back, her head brushing his shoulder. When she was with child, she used to cling to him for comfort, and he was always tender with...
He’s a young man who has lived under the shadow of the sword from the moment when he fled England as a boy of fourteen to the day when he rode home to fight for his claim. Nobody knows better than he...
Her sadness had given her a serenity which had not been there before. It was as if she had learned a hard lesson: that chances in life would not fall into her lap like ripe cherries.
He treats her as if he would spare her any fatigue, as if he has dedicated his life to her happiness.
He must desire the scent of the smoke of their sacrifice.