The Chosen Queen by Joanna Courtney
Hello, my fellow history enthusiasts! I love finding a historical novel that fills a gap in my knowledge, and The Chosen Queen did exactly that. Ealdgyth of Mercia was a woman I knew remarkably little about, despite her place at the heart of the events of 1066.
Joanna Courtney took me beyond the familiar story of Hastings and introduced me to a woman whose story I thoroughly enjoyed discovering.
1066 is one of those years that feels permanently etched into our historical consciousness. We know about the death of Edward the Confessor, Tostig and Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge, and of course the Battle of Hastings and the death of Harold Godwinson. Yet I realised while listening to The Chosen Queen that I knew far less about the years surrounding those famous events, and particularly about the woman who briefly became Harold's queen.
Joanna introduces us to Ealdgyth as a teenager, long before Hastings, when her powerful Mercian family is forced into exile. Her story takes us from England to Ireland and Wales, where she eventually marries Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, King of Wales. This whole part of Ealdgyth's life was largely new to me, and I found myself constantly adding pieces to a period of history I had previously understood mainly through the events of 1066.
Her experiences in Wales also had me making connections with women from later Plantagenet history. I thought particularly of Joanna, the illegitimate daughter of King John, who married Llywelyn the Great more than a century later. Both women entered a Welsh world very different from the one in which they had been raised, and it made me think about the difficulties medieval women faced when marriage took them into unfamiliar lands among people who did not necessarily welcome them.
What stayed with me most strongly, though, was Joanna's portrayal of the emotional world of medieval women. We read so much about armies marching away, battles being fought and kingdoms changing hands, but what was it like to be one of the women left behind, waiting to discover whether the men you loved were ever coming home?
That fear runs throughout Ealdgyth's story. She waits for news of her brothers after Fulford and Stamford Bridge, and later faces the terrible uncertainty surrounding Hastings. I found those scenes particularly affecting because they shifted my attention away from what was happening on the battlefield and towards the people who could do nothing but wait for news.
Loss is equally present. The death of Ealdgyth's first husband, Gruffudd, during their desperate flight through the Welsh countryside was heartbreaking. I am an emotional reader at the best of times, and yes, there were tears. Joanna made Ealdgyth's grief feel painfully immediate.
The aftermath of Hastings affected me even more. Joanna takes Ealdgyth onto the battlefield as she searches among the dead for Harold. Whether events unfolded precisely this way is another matter, but as a piece of storytelling it brought home the very human cost behind a battle whose date most of us have known since school.
The author also creates a relationship between Ealdgyth and Edith Swanneck, Harold's long-term partner before his marriage to Ealdgyth. Historically, we cannot know what relationship, if any, existed between the two women, but I liked the way Courtney used them to explore something much broader: the bonds that could exist between women living with loss, childbirth, separation and the ever-present possibility of death.
I was also very pleased to find a detailed author's note at the end. I always appreciate these in historical fiction because I want to know where the surviving evidence ends and the novelist's imagination begins. Joanna explains some of the choices she made, including her approach to names, and provides useful context for the real history behind her story.
The Chosen Queen does occasionally wander a little further into romance than I personally prefer, and at times I found myself thinking it was heading towards Mills & Boon territory. For me, Joanna doesn't quite reach the level of Elizabeth Chadwick or Anne O'Brien yet, but this was her debut novel, and there was plenty here that made me interested in reading more of her work.
More importantly, I finished the book knowing considerably more about Ealdgyth of Mercia than I did when I began. She had been little more than a name on the edge of a story I thought I knew. The Chosen Queen put her firmly into that story for me, and that is one of the things I value most about good historical fiction.
