It's based on the true story of the 14th-century love affair between Katherine de Roet and John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster. Part of the times - castles with their solars and kitchens and clothes (both jeweled and ragged) and strange foods and smells and holidays and chivalry and plagues, scarlet fever and stupid political and religious leaders, but also truly religious individuals who helped and were kind and understood others' weaknesses.

Katherine (Rediscovered Classics): Seton, Anya, Gregory Katherine (Rediscovered Classics): Seton, Anya, Gregory

They were all surnamed Beaufort, after a French lordship John had once held, and from them were descended the Royal Houses of York, Tudor, Stuart and every British sovereign since 1461. Our mamas read this paean to the ripped bodice and flung codpiece with, I feel morally certain, cool detachment and a keen analytical eye for its prosody. For me, the seams itched and the sleeves were too short and the zipper caught me in a painful and distracting way.Viewed from the perspective of its publication fifty years ago, Katherine is one of Seton's more respected and significant works, a retelling of the fourteenth century love affair of a beautiful, convent-raised young woman, Katherine de Roet, who arrives at the English Court through the offices of the Queen, marries Hugh, Duke of Swynford, a small minded, brutal man and has a mythic romance with John of Gaunt, third son of King Edward. It diverges comparatively little from known history, though since archival documentation of Katherine's life is limited, it does contain some necessary conjecture.

Katherine - Anya Seton - Google Books

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. This is an old-style romance (which is the best kind in my opinion) where the intimacy is only alluded to. Our features are original articles from our print magazines (these will say where they were originally published) or original articles commissioned for this site.

But a good historical novel has characters whose basic humanity engages our empathy and whose convincing circumstances remind us that the past is, indeed, another country. Seton said that her greatest debt of all was to Miss Amy Flagg of Westoe Village in South Shields, her father's birthplace. The Duke and Katherine separate for a number of years, immediately following Wat Tyler's Peasants' Revolt in 1381, when the rioting peasants sacked and burnt the Duke's Savoy Palace to the ground.