Katherine

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1954. Book Club (BCE/BOMC). Hard Cover. Very Good/No Jacket. 8x5x1. Book club edition. Lacks jacket. Boards faintly soiled. 1954 Hard Cover. xii, 588, [1] pp. 8vo. "This is the true and hitherto untold story of John of Gaunt, the great Duke of Lancaster, and Katherine Swynford, and of their love which changed English history. It takes place in the fourteenth century, during the wane of feudalism and chivalry and the dawn of revolt against Church and State. Knights went forth to battle and the wealth of the country was poured into foreign wars, while the peasants lived as serfs. When the magnificent Plantagenets -- Edward III, the Black Prince, and Richard II -- ruled despotically over a court rotten with intrigue, John of Gaunt, the proudest of them all, fought for power and lost his heart to Katherine Swynford. Katherine was an innocent girl of fifteen, convent bred, when she came to court to join her sister Philippa who was waiting-woman to the Queen. It was Geoffrey Chaucer, Philippa's husband, who first sensed Katherine's disturbing star-struck beauty. During the dreary years of her marriage to the impoverished Saxon knight Hugh Swynford, it seemed that Chaucer had been mistaken. But there were many strange and tragic developments in store for Katherine, whose illicit love was to bring her shame and bitterness as well as joy. Anya Seton has written a thoroughly documented biographical novel of conflict, cruelty, and spiritual awareness about a woman history has ignored and a man it has maligned, interwoven with the story of medieval England -- the England of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Wyclif, of the Black Death, and of Wat Tyler and the Peasants' Revolt. This is Miss Seton's most important and distinguished book. It is actual history, an immensely moving love story, brought to life by a skilled novelist.