Anne Somerset
Webster’s Muse
As Sarah Gristwood remarks in her preface, ‘History has an unamiable habit of losing the losers.’ This being so, Arbella Stuart usually features as little more than a footnote in studies of the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts. With hindsight it is easy to assume that she was always destined to be consigned to obscurity, but Gristwood reminds us that in her own day Arbella was believed to have a respectable chance of succeeding Elizabeth I as England’s Queen.
Arbella was the granddaughter of two formidable women. Her paternal grandmother was Henry VIII’s niece, the Countess of Lennox, and it was from her that Arbella derived her claim to the crown. Her mother’s mother was the Countess of Shrewsbury (better known as Bess of Hardwick), a terrifying virago who
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match
'She lived in a damp basement with her mother and sister, smoking roll-ups and talking to her parrot.'
Joanna Kavenna traces the life of the 'almost-forgotten poet' Charlotte Mew.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-hated-poetry-readings
'If, as James Wolcott once claimed, Roth was a miracle of modern medicine, he was also one of therapy’s notable failures.'
@leorobsonwriter on Philip Roth, that 'walking, wanking paradox'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-great-american-novelist