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Review: A Want of Kindness

Tale of a troubled reign

September 10, 2015 13:17
Joanne Limburg: warmth, intelligence and a sense of humanity in history

By

Kate Saunders,

Kate Saunders

2 min read

By Joanne Limburg
Atlantic, £14.99

Queen Anne has always been rather a wallflower of a monarch when it comes to historical fiction. We like the architecture of her era (late 17th century), and the lively politics (the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688) but the woman herself was a plain old pudding, and not obvious material for a sizzling bodice-ripper of the Philippa Gregory school.

In A Want of Kindness, which is anything but a bodice-ripper, Joanne Limburg tells Anne's story in a series of short, episodic chapters that slowly build a compelling picture of the last of the Stuarts. Her life was a sad one; not showily tragic, like that of her grandfather King Charles I, nor entertainingly naughty, like that of her uncle Charles II; just sad, and bleakly lacking in ordinary "kindness".

When we first meet Anne, in 1675, she is an awkward little girl of 10, with chronically watery eyes and a habit of comfort eating. Anne and her older sister, Mary, are the only surviving children of the short-lived James II, who was sacked for a) his unpopularity, b) his Roman Catholic sympathies, and c) the lingering, stubborn belief in the "divine right" of kings that those Stuarts could never quite shake off.