The Empress of the Last Days - Hardcover

Stevenson, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618149147 ISBN 13: 9780618149148

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 2004

Synopsis

This is a novel of many pleasures: an interracial love story that is also a scholarly detective tale. A young Oxford don named Michael Foxwist and a group of his academic friends come upon a collection of dusty old documents; they are intrigued to learn of the clandestine seventeenth-century marriage of the black prince Pelagius and Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia. With mounting excitement, they discover that the true queen of England may not be the familiar dowdy elderly woman of German extraction but a young and gifted black scientist of independent mind. She lives in Barbados and is the last surviving descendant of Elizabeth and Pelagius. Michael confronts her with her heritage only to find that she refuses to be the child of destiny and insists on being herself. But their meeting changes everything - they fall in love. Of different race, nationality, and temperament, they must re-examine all their assumptions and the terms on which they live.
Though written to be read independently, The Empress of the Last Days is also the conclusion to Jane Stevenson's acclaimed historical trilogy, companion to The Winter Queen and The Shadow King.

About this title

About the Author

JANE STEVENSON was born in London and brought up in London, Beijing, and Bonn. She teaches literature and history at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of Several Deceptions, a collection of four novellas; a novel, London Bridges; and the acclaimed historical trilogy made up of the novels The Winter Queen, The Shadow King, and The Empress of the Last Days. Stevenson lives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* This sophisticated novel has the feel of years of planning--not because it is overdone but because it is intricate, vastly knowledgeable, and well thought out. It is the concluding volume of a trilogy that reimagines the life of Elizabeth of Bohemia, sister of England's Charles I and a lively figure in seventeenth-century politics; it follows The Winter Queen (2002) and The Shadow King (2003) and brings Stevenson's interpretation of the queen's life and lasting effect up to the present day. The trilogy's two previous volumes wondered what would have happened if Elizabeth of Bohemia had married--a second time, and clandestinely--a black African prince and former slave. And now, in her infinite creativity, the author unleashes a group of scholars to unearth and interpret a trove of documents establishing the veracity of that long-ago situation and thus the precedence of an alternative family line of claimants to the British throne. So, who is the rightful monarch of Britain--the current occupant, Queen Elizabeth II, or a black scientist in Barbados? As much about competition in academe as about alternate versions of history, this novel is reminiscent in its learned tone of the works of A. S. Byatt. Brad Hooper
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About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0618149147
• ISBN 13: 9780618149148
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360