Reviewed: “The Lost Tudor Princess: The Life of Lady Margaret Douglas” by Alison Weir

I love Tudor history.

I love reading about the women who lived in the Tudor era.

I have read other books by Alison Weir about the Tudor era, so I was excited to be able to read The Lost Tudor Princess… and then I remembered the trouble with reading Alison Weir’s books about the Tudor era… they are long and they have a tendency to read sort of like Weir found old lists stuffed in faded books in dusty libraries and turned them into paragraphs. Which is probably a part of what happens when writing about someone this far removed from modern day history and not as well known as, say, Anne Boleyn.

However, pages upon pages of what kind of fabric Henry VIII sent to his niece for Christmas after Christmas and how much he paid for them is, while interesting, not the most exciting thing to read about. Especially not when Lady Margaret Douglas was a very interesting figure who did not necessarily live a life wholly consumed by clothes and jewels. She was involved in countless intrigues, some of which would seem to make Anne Boleyn pale in comparison. Weir does write about those… she just has a tendency to drift back into “and the curtains were purple” or other such things that, while describing life in Tudor England, seem vaguely out of place in what she wants to be the biography of a daughter, niece, cousin, sister, and mother-in-law to the kings and queens who ruled England and Scotland.

I tried to read this book for six weeks. I am giving up now because… maybe it’s me or maybe it’s the moment, but I just can’t do it. I’ll probably go back to it eventually, because it is a good, incredibly well-researched book. When I get over my fear of lists of fabrics…

I received a copy of The Lost Tudor Princess: The Life of Lady Margaret Douglas through NetGalley and Random House – Ballantine in exchange for an honest and original review. All thoughts are my own.