Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Young Life (The Eleanor Code Book 1)
WRITTEN BY MARK RICHARD BEAULIEU
REVIEW BY STEVE DONOGHUE
“It is the beginning of her story, and the Aquitaine, indeed the world, will never be the same.”
The lush, prosperous land of Aquitaine, the wealthiest province in Europe in the 12th century, provides the crucially exceptional backdrop for the story Mark Beaulieu sets out to tell. The story of the childhood of the Aquitaine’s most famous historical resident, the young woman who would go on to become both Queen of France and Queen of England, but who would be known to history as Eleanor of Aquitaine.
In Beaulieu’s novel, the first in his ambitious Eleanor Code sequence, we meet a sunny, willful, already unconventional young Alienor long before the decades of her fame, at a period of her life that should provide little or no inherent drama, and yet Beaulieu manages, through a combination of quick pacing, vivid dialogue, and a consistently strong insight into the world of the mental origins of what would become the concept of courtly love, to make the story every bit as interesting as the more dramatic later periods of her life.
Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Journey East
WRITTEN BY MARK RICHARD BEAULIEU
REVIEW BY STEVE DONOGHUE
Mark Richard Beaulieu’s ongoing series of historical novels about that much-storied historical figure, Eleanor of Aquitaine, continues in The Journey East. This instalment spotlights her marriage to King Louis VII of France, her ongoing tangles with the French court, and, in the book’s dramatic set-piece, Louis’ decision to take her with him as he goes 3000 miles to the Holy Land in order to liberate Jerusalem from the Saracens in the Second Crusade.
Devoting 500 pages to a period of Eleanor’s life that most of her other biographers leave comfortably in the past is something of a gamble; most readers will be expecting the Eleanor they know best, the wife of Henry II of England, the rival of Fair Rosamund, the mother of kings. What Beaulieu gives us instead is the making of that legend out of one intelligent, passionate, beautiful young woman (as she encounters an expertly well-conceived cast of secondary characters). This series is taking its time reaching that most famous period in its subject’s life, and it’s doing so with such skill that readers will only want more.