I met Rosemary at the Dartmouth Book Festival. I have just finished reading her book, and heartily commend it. The woman of noble wit in question is Katherine Raleigh née Champernowne, mother of Sir Walter Raleigh, amongst many others.

The story starts gently, not at all “in medias res” as we writers are advised to begin. Yet the seduction slowly builds until the reader is completely hooked. Whilst the journey is through Katherine’s life, it is almost a journey through the writer’s life, from tentative beginning to the most masterful ending.

There are a few quirks. The first line of each chapter IS IN CAPITAL LETTERS. I use a drop cap for the first letter of each chapter, as does C.J. Sansom. I don’t recall ever coming across capitalised first lines before, but perhaps that’s my memory failing me. I use single quotation marks for dialogue, and double quotation marks for reported speech. Rosemary uses double quotation marks for dialogue. I don’t think there is any reported speech.

The story is told in third person narration focussing on Katherine. At the end of many chapters there are often pages headed Otho, Walter, or Katherine. These give us each protagonist’s view of the preceding conflict, which I found very illuminating. It is a lesson we should all learn. The conflict seemed so clear, yet seen from the other angle, really rather different.

There are some similarities with my work, The Spy who Sank the Armada. Both books tell the story of real people, whose important stories were little known beforehand. They overlap very closely historically, and they have both involved intensive research and imagination. At the beginning I really wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy it, or even finish it. I really, really enjoyed it.