Elizabeth and Mary
Page 64
Rather than attempting an historian’s global approach, Dunn deliberately chose a close biographical focus, using the letters, speeches and poems of the queens and their contemporaries, allowing them to explain themselves through their own words. Researching and writing the biography deepened her attitudes to the women. ‘I certainly found Elizabeth a more tender, witty and insecure person that I had initially thought her to be whereas I found Mary was more tough-minded and ruthless, though prone to disastrous impetuosity and emotional collapse.’
Because of the power of her voice, it was hard not to let Elizabeth dominate the book, so, in an attempt to be as even-handed as possible, Dunn hung a portrait of Mary opposite her desk. ‘I had to constantly remind myself that, like many physically charming people, Mary had a much more powerful effect on people who met her than the impression she leaves behind in her letters’. Though the portrait still hangs opposite her, Dunn’s attention has moved on to a new double biography – the courtship and marriage between Dorothy Osborne and William Temple.
Her childhood has served Dunn well, giving her the freedom to pursue her adventures through the books she chooses to write. ‘I think the sense of being an immigrant is interesting,’ she says. ‘You can never really be an insider, which gives you more freedom but also, I suppose, less security and one less layer of skin.’
SNAPSHOT
BORN
Durban, South Africa.
EDUCATION
Bentley Grammar School, Calne, Wiltshire; Clifton High School for Girls, Bristol; University College, London University to read Philosophy.
CAREER
Journalist and writer.
BOOKS
Moon in Eclipse: Life of Mary Shelley; A Very Close Conspiracy, published as Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy; Antonia White; Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens.
Life Drawing
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Coming home on a blustery autumn day to someone I love, reading by a roaring fire.
What is your greatest fear?
Drowning when failing to save someone else from drowning.
Which living person do you most admire?
As I was born a South African, Mandela is my immediate thought, but really any David who outfaces a Goliath.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
A waterfall.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
The energy you offer to the world comes back to you in unexpected ways.
What would be your desert island luxury?
A superking Siberian goosedown duvet.
Which writer has had the greatest influence on your work?
Michael Holroyd and Richard Holmes showed me how wide and deep and true biography could be: but the writers who made me want to write as a child were Enid Blyton and her Famous Five, John Masefield, C. S. Lewis and Georgette Heyer.
Do you have a favourite book?
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography – all of life and human character is there.
Where do you go for inspiration?
A luxurious bed.
Which book do you wish you had written?
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley – in a huge leap of imagination it embodies a universal truth.
What are you writing at the moment?
The Temples: Family Passions in Restoration England. Inspired by the brilliant letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple in the middle of the 17th century, I want to uncover the domestic pleasures and tragedies of these two remarkable people at a pivotal point in English history.
A Random First Eleven Favourite Reads
1. The Diaries of Virginia Woolf
(Chatto)
2. If This is a Man
Primo Levi (Abacus)
3. First Love
Ivan Turgenev (Penguin)
4. The Golden Gate
Vikram Seth (Faber)
5. A Month in the Country
JL Carr (Penguin)
6. Lytton Strachey
Michael Holroyd (Penguin)
7. Bruno’s Dream
Iris Murdoch (Vintage)
8. The Getting of Wisdom
Henry Handel Richardson (Virago)
9. The Gate of Angels
Penelope Fitzgerald (Flamingo)
10. The White Goddess
Robert Graves (Faber)
11. Evelina
Fanny Burney (Oxford)
ABOUT THE BOOK
Critical Eye
THE DYNAMIC BETWEEN Elizabeth and Mary, two regnant queens and cousins who never met, has exerted a compulsive fascination down the years. Reviewing Elizabeth and Mary in the Daily Mail, Roy Strong wrote, ‘What is riveting for us today is that we are able not only to read what the rival queens wrote to each other but what they wrote and said about each other to everyone else. Jane Dunn has written a splendid piece of popular history with the ready pen of a highly skilled writer, endowed with a remarkable insight into the complex motives which drove these two powerful women.’ In the Daily Telegraph, Margaret Drabble drew attention to the interdependence between the two women,’ … decisions made by each altered the fate of the other … Why did one die in bed, the other on the block? This account suggests many plausible answers … This mythic story will never die.’ The Guardian’s Katherine Hughes was intrigued by the book’s concentration on the ‘reverse symmetry’ and resulting contrasts in the lives of the two women. ‘Dunn works these contrasts hard, in the process creating a kind of psychological drama in which each woman becomes a fateful reverse image of the other.’ For Lucy Hughes-Hallett in the Observer, the women, though opposites, were also equivalents. ‘Dunn argues persuasively that Elizabeth cared passionately about Mary’s failure, not for sentimental reasons of family or sisterhood … but because her own position as female monarch was so precarious that Mary’s spectacular demonstration of a woman’s unfitness to rule perilously undermined it.’
The Bigger Picture Queens of Stage and Screen
IN HER OWN LIFETIME Elizabeth I, ‘Gloriana’, was the subject of fawning plays, such as Lyly’s Endymion (1588) and Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris (1589), while her cousin Mary Queen of Scots did not become a popular dramatic subject for another two hundred years. It was then that the romantic German poet Friedrich Schiller saw the possibilities of a drama built around the conflict between the two queens, and his highly successful play Mary Stuart (1800) was the first to include a fictitious confrontation between the two women. In modern times, and writing from a feminist stance, the Scot Liz Lochead has used the conflict to comment on the state of contemporary Scotland in her provocative play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987).
Meanwhile the Elizabeth/Mary face-off had become a favourite theme for the movies. At the very end of the 19th century, Mary became the subject of one of the first films ever made, The Execution of Mary Stuart (1895). Another silent film was the celebrated Loves of Queen Elizabeth (1912) in which Sarah Bernhardt reprised one of her most popular stage roles in the story of Elizabeth and Essex, which was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Still in the silent era, there was The Loves of Mary Queen of Scots (1923 which starred Ellen Compton as Elizabeth and Fay Compton as Mary.
John Ford is more familiar as a director of westerns but his 1936 costume drama Mary Queen of Scots was a favourable take on Mary, as played by Katherine Hepburn, opposite a scheming Elizabeth (Florence Estridge). In the same year the English actress, Flora Robson played a doughty Elizabeth in the British film Fire Over England (1936) and again in The Sea Hawk (1940). In the first the principal romantic interest lay in Laurence Olivier, playing Michael Ingolby. In the second, it was the swashbuckling Errol Flynn who stole the show. Another actress to play Queen Elizabeth twice on screen was Bette Davis. She did so first in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex again with Errol Flynn donning the doublet and hose, and again in The Virgin Queen (1955), with Richard Rodd as
Sir Walter Raleigh. After World War Two, a spirited interpretation of the teenage Elizabeth was given by Jean Simmons in Young Bess (1954), a film in which she is madly in love with Thomas Seymour (Stewart Grainger).
Perhaps the greatest of the screen Elizabeths has been Glenda Jackson, whose powerful portrayal of Elizabeth in the 1971 BBC serial Elizabeth R was later reprised in the film Mary Queen of Scots (1971), with Vanessa Redgrave in the part of Mary. The Oscar-winning comedy Shakespeare in Love (1998) had Judi Dench in a superb cameo role as an elderly, no-nonsense Elizabeth. The latest actress to shoulder the role of Elizabeth is Cate Blanchett in the highly cinematic (but historically not always accurate) Elizabeth (1998), which traces the young queen’s struggle to be herself and rule in her own right. Meanwhile Quentin Crisp put in an amusing cross-dressing performance as a geriatric Elizabeth in Derek Jarman’s Orlando (1992).
READ ON
Have you read?
Moon in Eclipse: Life of Mary Shelley
Jane Dunn
‘Jane Dunn has that sine qua non of the true biographer, an eye for significant detail and the power to fit it into a larger pattern’. Richard Holmes, The Times
Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy
Jane Dunn (Virago)
‘Dunn plunges deep beneath the surface to the complicated emotions and personalities of these two women, illuminating them with great clarity and understanding’
Observer
‘Those who feel they’ve had enough of Bloomsbury may find their interest revived by this elegant double biography exploring the relationship between its two formidable sisters in whom sisterly love and sibling rivalry were equally mixed. And if they think they know only too much about Virginia, they will certainly be intrigued by the more mysterious and less famous Vanessa’ Sunday Telegraph
‘An outstanding work, and reading it is a source of real pleasure … one of the best books on Virginia Woolf to date’ Literary Review
Antonia White: A Life
Jane Dunn
‘Jane Dunn is one of our best biographers … She has the humanity, and the understanding needed to unravel the story of a soul in torment.’ Sunday Times
‘A searing biography: Jane Dunn who writes with captivating elegance and piercing intelligence, is tender, scrupulous, ironic and wordly.’ Independent
‘Gifted, wounded and at times monstrous, White emerges as a woman who decided that suffering was the condition of living on the edge … an excellent biography’ Elizabeth Buchan, Mail on Sunday
If you loved this, you’ll like …
Mary Queen of Scots
Antonia Fraser
Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley
Alison Weir
Elizabeth I
Anne Somerset (Flamingo)
Six Wives – Queens of Henry VIII
David Starkey (Chatto)
The Cradle King: A life of James VI and I
Alan Stewart (Chatto)
The History of Britain (boxset)
Simon Schama (BBC)
Henry VIII
David Starkey (Chatto)
The Elizabethan World Picture
EM Tillyard (Chatto)
The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry
Roy Strong (Pimlico)
London: A biography
Peter Ackroyd (Vintage)
Find Out More
www.marie-stuart.co.uk – the website of the Mary Stuart Society
www.royalstuartsociety.com – the website of the Royal Stuart Society
www.tudorhistory.org – an introduction to Tudor life
http://renaissance.dm.net – an introduction to many aspects of the Elizabeth world
www.elizabethi.org – information on the life and times of Elizabeth I
www.royal.gov.uk – the official website of the British monarchy
www.tudor-portraits.com – portraits and other works of art from the Tudor and Elizabethan eras
www.luminarium.org.renlit – section on Elizabeth I contains online poems, speeches and letters by her, essays and articles about her, an image, gallery and bibliography
Or Visit
Hampton Court Palace
The Tower of London
Linlithgow
Edinburgh Castle
Holyrood House
Stirling Castle
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Words cannot praise the London Library highly enough. It is a private institution where a member has access not only to an extensive library but can carry off great numbers of books, even reference books, for loans that can extend crucially into years. My only dread was the call of another member in need of one of ‘my’ volumes. Heartfelt thanks go to this great, individualistic institution and its unfailingly helpful staff. There are many individuals who have helped me write this book. Thanks first to Sheila Murphy who fifteen years ago or so first suggested the queens as a marvellous subject for a book. The idea lurked in my subconscious during my next two writing marathons. Only then was I able to begin. Sheila has been the first critical eye to read every one of my books, and her suggestions and generous editorial comments on Elizabeth and Mary were invaluable. Others I should like to thank include Lola Bubbosh; the late Sheila Dickinson; Sue Greenhill; Beryl Hislop; Rosalind Oxenford; Dr Peter Shephard; the late David Thesen; and Elizabeth Walston. Particular thanks to Robin Bell for permission to quote from his elegant translations of Mary Queen of Scots’ poems, previously published as Bittersweet Within My Heart.
On a professional front, I could not have a better agent than Derek Johns and his great team at A.P. Watt. Derek has transformed my working life. Warm thanks to him and his assistant Anjali Pratap. Derek’s greatest gifts to me as his author are my editors, Carol Janeway at Knopf in the United States and Arabella Pike at HarperCollins. Arabella has brought an incisive intelligence to everything, applied with such warmth and humour that it has been a delight to work with her. Around her are a team whose extraordinary quality was epitomized by a magical candle-lit banquet and firework display at Hampton Court Palace. Tilly Ware organised it, and nobody lucky enough to be there will ever forget it.
The last year of writing this book was inextricably linked for me with the final illness of my father. A great family enterprise brought our whole band of brothers and sisters together to care for him: so Karen, Mark, Isabel, Brigid, Tricia, Andy and Sue, with their own generous families, have all become a part of it, and none more than our mother Ellinor, with her zest for life and instinctive understanding of death.
The writer’s life is inevitably isolated and hard for those closest to her. My own family, Lily, Ben, Jess and Nick’s daughter Sophia, have brought patience, insight and support to me during difficult times. And Ellie and Theo have arrived to gladden our hearts. Closest of all to the rock face is Nick, my partner in most things, my linguist, lightning conductor and love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELIZABETH AND MARY
COUSINS, RIVALS, QUEENS
JANE DUNN is the biographer of the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, of Mary Shelley, and most recently a groundbreaking biography of Antonia White. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Bath.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have retained early modern English in quotations where they occur thus in the source. On occasion I have clarified words or phrases and put them in square brackets. Otherwise, most quotations are in modern English, which is how they occur in the source.
Catholic countries changed from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian in October 1582, when they lost ten days. This meant the English calendar continued ten days behind. The period of history that this book encompasses is mostly pre-1582 and consequently all dates correspond with the Julian calendar.
NOTES
CHAPTER ONE The Fateful Step
1 State Paper
s, Foreign, I, 107
2 Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 95
3 Italian Relations of England, Sneyd, p. 20
4 Annals, Hayward, 1
5 Carmen, Epithalamia tria Maria, trans. Wrangham, 23