Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne

Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne
By David Starkey (400 pages)
Published by Harper Perennial
Bookish rating: 3.75

One can't spend all her reading time consuming fiction, even if it's literary (or not). No, one must occasionally read nonfiction and glean a fact or two, a sense of a historical era, a grasp of how many freaking people Queen Mary burned for heresy.

Like most, this Protestant ain't a big fan of Queen Mary.

But Elizabeth? Oh, we all love Elizabeth, don't we?

This biography of Elizabeth I is smart, a tad spunky, and deeply researched, but it's also intended for a non-academic audience. It's not a textbook. It does not have the logo of a university press on its spine. It's price point is that of your average paperback.

The text is well written and Starkey successfully gives us a non-romanticized glimpse of Elizabeth. He portrays her as the historical evidence reflects her, which is hugely intelligent, politically calculating, genuinely religious, and probably insanely intimidating. We get a sense of her childhood and relationship to Henry VIII, and even her mother Anne Boleyn. Before, you know, her dad had her mom's head chopped off.

As the book's subtitle suggests, the vast majority of the biography focuses on Elizabeth's path to the throne, which was exactly what I was looking for. Her coronation wasn't easy--or a given, that much I knew. But all that in-between stuff, from Henry VIII's death to Elizabeth's rule was unclear to me. So, I got filled in.

The text isn't a fast read--history rarely is, at least for me--but I'd recommend it to anyone who fancies all that is Elizabethan.