I was excited to pick up a book which looks at Elizabeth I’s life from a different perspective. All the histories I have read (sorry Alison Weir – you too) seem to only treat her as a powerful monarch (which she was).

Borman explores what she might have felt as a precocious girl, a teen, a young woman – and how her life experiences shaped her psyche and her character - almost all the people in her life were women. Strong, smart women.

Unfortunately, the narrative bogged down in the second half (as does every other book about Gloriana I have read), when her life became consumed by the great high school lunchroom that was the British royal court.
( )

3.5

What an arduous read...there was so much information! There has been very little written about Elizabeth and her Privy Household...so if you want to really know about the other side of Elizabeth's life, I suggest that this is the book to read.

Although Elizabeth was a Great Ruler, she was no less fickle, egocentric, & vengeful than her father Henry VIII. She ruled by answering problems with "answers answerless".

The turmoil of her younger life made for a sociopath of a woman. She never knew whom she could trust and therefore played mind games with her court & everyone she came in contact with. She was extremely paranoid and saw plots against here, even where there were none.


The way she treated her "ladies" was abominable...she was mean, jealous, verbally abusive, petty & downright nasty.

She refused to allow any of her Ladies to marry without her permission (which she ALWAYS refused to give), so in desperation, most of them either became someone's mistress or married behind her back. When Elizabeth found out, usually because of a pregnancy, she would fly into a rage and severely punish the woman & her husband. If/when she deigned to forgive the "transgression", it was usually the man who fared better.

She was also Extremely vain and delusional about her beauty until she was in her late sixties.....that is when she finally realized that she had become a veritable old hag (my description). At that point she basically gave up living, sequestered herself in her rooms and stopped eating.

So after reading this exhausting account of Elizabeth I, she is no longer my Idol....I found her behavior to be inexcusable for one of her rank & privilege. ( )

"Elizabeth's Women" is an interesting read about the women who had an influence on Queen Elizabeth I, from her mother and other childhood caregivers to the women who attended her as queen. I did not find very much new material in it, and was a little disappointed not to find more about Dorothy Stafford, one of the women who attended Her Grace longest, but that's a personal lack, that other readers would not miss. I would recommend it to anyone wanting a different slant on Elizabeth's court, as most books on the period tend to focus on the men who surrounded the Queen.

this book dragged on a bit for me, but there was enough interesting stuff to keep me reading. ( )

Elizabeth’s Women: Friends, Rivals, and Foes Who Shaped the Virgin Queen by Tracy Borman is a biography of Elizabeth I’s life as influenced by the women who helped shaped it.

It begins before Elizabeth’s birth with a history of her mother, Anne Boleyn, then describes both Anne’s life as queen and her treatment of her daughter before her execution, which occurred when Elizabeth was almost three years old.

The biography continues on with chapters devoted to the lives of those who influenced Elizabeth when she was growing up and after she became queen. There are good mini-biographies of her female servants, friends, enemies, and relations, who include her step-mothers, her sister Mary, and cousin Mary, Queen of Scots.

Overall, the book is a well-researched biography written in an accessible manner. It tells the history of Elizabeth from a new angle – from the point of view of her interactions with the women in her life. This was something new to me, having read other, dryer biographies of Elizabeth, and was a refreshing change of perception. I recommend this book for anyone interested in this period in history and give it four stars. ( )