Too much description of intimate details in and out of the marriage bed that I would rather not have known. Too much adultery described too salaciously. Quite a bit of violence, again with gory details. Melodrama. Justification of actions that cannot be justified. Way too long (882 pages).
However, I can forgive the author and recommend this novel, with those reservations, because this book about the lives of Edward IV and Richard III of England got the important stuff right. I could tell from the beginning of the book, page 1, that Richard would be the hero of the story, that he would be good, although imperfect. I knew that Ms. Penman’s Richard would never steal his brother’s crown because he was greedy for power. Nor would he ever murder his two boy nephews, his brother’s sons, after keeping them imprisoned in the Tower. Although Ms. Penman indicts a different villain in the murders than did Josephine Tey in her book Daughter of Time, the book that first convinced me that Richard III was innocent of the murders that history has accused him of perpetrating, Penman agrees with Tey on the main point: Richard wasn’t the villain. He was loyal, brave, and tragic. He was a good guy in spite of his blind spots.
The novel also gives a vivid picture of fifteenth century England, the political intrigue and the battles of the War of the Roses, and the lives of the Yorkist kings, Edward IV and his brother, Richard III. If some of the details would have been better omitted, other details about how people lived and how they thought and who was related to whom were fascinating. I read that Richard’s and Edward’s brother, Edmund, was killed while still a teenager in the same battle in which their father, Richard of York, died. I was reminded that Richard loved and married his cousin, Anne Neville, daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker and widow of the Lancastrian candidate for the throne Edward of Lancaster. Did you know that Richard III was accused, after Anne’s death, of desiring to marry his niece, Elizabeth Woodville, the daughter of his deceased bother, Edward IV, and that Elizabeth Woodville went on to marry Henry Tudor, the pretender who took the throne from Richard? All the switching sides, cross and double-cross, that went on during the War of the Roses and during the reigns of Edward IV and Richard III, is amazing to read about. I thought politics was a blood sport nowadays, but it’s nothing compared to fifteenth century intrigue and diplomacy and treachery.
And The Sunne in Splendor was a good book in spite of its faults.
Oh, yes, and Shakespeare was a better writer, but a poor historian, dependent on flawed sources.
And Richard was most likely not humpbacked either.
