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Monday 13th February

A Secret Alchemy By Emma Darwin

Posted at 11:06AM Tuesday 30 Dec 2008

A Secret Alchemy
ISBN: 9780755330652

In Richard III, there's a scene often cut in performance. A scrivener, a chronicler of public affairs, notes that an execution is being misrecorded almost as it happens. Historians long after the event will be even more unreliable, then. Shakespeare's Elizabethan audience can infer that the docudrama they're watching more than 100 years after Richard's death may be less than accurate about his guilt and Henry VII's virtue. Even now, nobody knows what happened to the Princes in the Tower: Richard's nephews, sons of Edward IV.

Emma Darwin's novel tells the story of the princes' mother, Elizabeth Woodville, and her brother Anthony, Earl Rivers, guardian to the elder boy. Darwin interleaves late-medieval plottings with the modern family saga of an academic, Una Pryor, who is researching Elizabeth's and Anthony's books. The "researcher" approach is reminiscent of Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time.

The Pryors' bereavements and betrayals don't illuminate the Plantagenets' troubles, or vice versa. The medieval and modern are linked by metaphors of alchemy through art, sex or chemistry.

Tags: Loraine Fletcher | Fiction

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