Sarah Gristwood > Quotes

“Even their contemporaries felt that the relationship of Elizabeth and Robert transcended the details on practicality. There had to be some explanation for their lifelong fidelity, and those contemporaries put it down to 'synaptia', a hidden conspiracy of the stars, whose power to rule human lives no-one doubted: 'a sympathy of spirits between them, occasioned perhaps by some secret constellation', in the words of the historian William Camden, writing at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Theirs was a relationship already rooted in history and mythology. And that moment when Elizabeth heard she had come to the throne encapsulated much about their story. If our well-loved picture of Elizabeth's accession is something of a fantasy - if the reality is on the whole more interesting - you might say the same about our traditional picture of her relationship with Robert Dudley.”
― Sarah Gristwood, Elizabeth & Leicester: Power, Passion, Politics

“If shrewdness and sharpness be a just cause of separation between man and wife, I think few men in England would keep their wives long.’ The”
― Sarah Gristwood, Arbella: England's Lost Queen

“There’s nothing closer than a diplomat and a spy.”
― Sarah Gristwood, The Queen's Mary: In the Shadows of Power...

“Many of the battles these women fought are still relevant.

Almost thirty years ago, Antonia Fraser, in her groundbreaking book Boadicea’s Chariot, traced the line of ‘warrior queens’ from the ancient world to the Iron Lady. She identified several tropes of female leadership-the Chaste Syndrome and the Voracity Syndrome, the role of a woman as Holy (Armed) Figurehead or Peacemaker-and traced them from Celtic mythology and the Roman Empire to the female leaders of her own day: Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi.”
― Sarah Gristwood, Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe

“Vita’s relationship with Virginia, which began shortly after, was of a different calibre – a relationship in which both Harold Nicolson and Virginia’s husband Leonard were supportive presences. The bond that endured between those two women was predominantly, though not exclusively, one of the heart, and of the mind.”
― Sarah Gristwood, Vita & Virginia: The lives and love of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

“With Edward’s death imminent, questions of whether a woman could succeed were irrelevant. The only question was, which woman?”
― Sarah Gristwood, Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe