In Print

Captive Queen: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine

It’s a tribute to Eleanor of Aquitaine’s enduring charm that she still captures the modern imagination nearly 1,000 years after her birth, the subject of a recent flurry of books. And it’s to the long-dead queen’s advantage that she was long ago installed as a feminist icon, because this book might as easily have been titled The Cougar Queen. The indelible image of the 28-year-old duchess of Europe’s mighty Aquitaine throwing off a loveless marriage to the pious Louis VII of France in favor of Henry, the virile, 10-years-younger heir to England’s Plantagenet dynasty, gives Alison Weir’s story a contemporary spin that can’t be ignored. This isn’t Weir’s first dance with Eleanor – she detailed her life in 2001’s nonfiction Eleanor of Aquitaine – and Weir recently rehabbed Anne Boleyn in The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn. Still, it’s a practiced step from history to fiction, and that’s where the art of writing takes over. Weir’s well-tended prose feels heavy-handed sometimes, the dialogue laden with historical exposition intended to inform yet often sounding stilted. She is strongest in writing about the intricacies that drove the intrigues and bloodlust of not just the individuals but a young Europe struggling for identity. Yet Captive Queen feels like it belongs in a mass market paperback for poolside reading, and that’s largely because of the proliferation of sex within more befits the classic bodice-rippers. Indeed, Eleanor the cougar tongue-wrestles her young lion after sex by page 48, the first of more than enough couplings to produce the nine heirs to the Plantagenet dynasty and then some. The notion of horny royals being a time-honored one, the numerous affairs of his (notably, Rosamund de Clifford) and hers (his father and her uncle) are woven into the fabric, indistinguishable from the politics of the day. And perhaps that is Weir’s neat parlor trick here, along with her pinpoint accuracy. Maybe the lack of monarchy in the United States makes us forget how much blood and honor is worth when sex is a mitigating factor, values that seem positively archaic in this millennium but drove the last one. Alison Weir’s Eleanor of Aquitaine lives and breathes ancient, refined air and passes back into history with the book’s mannered end.

This article appears in August 13 • 2010.