King's Daughter

by Jane Gaskell, Boris Vallejo (Illustrator)

A fantasy history.

Genres: Fantasy

280 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

Gaskell was born Jane Gaskell Denvil on 7 July 1941, in Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria, England (previously in the county of Lancashire). She is the great grandniece of the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. Her first novel, Strange Evil, was written when she was 14-years-old (published two years later, in 1957). In 1963 Gaskell married truck driver Gerald Lynch; and in 1965 their daughter, Lucy Emma, was born. (Their marriage ended in divorce in 1968.)

In 1970 she received the Somerset Maugham Award for her novel A Sweet, Sweet Summer.

China Miéville lists Strange Evil as one of the top 10 examples of weird fiction.

Wikipedia®

Reviews

[Lynda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly, I gave this book an extra start because the ending really surprised me. It starts with a princess who runs away from home. She runs into trouble with one man after another, yet maintains her innocence (and her virginity) throughout many travails. This book was written in 1958, so of course the girl is saved by one man or another throughout the story, but she still manages to save lives and cause the capture of a bad guy. And I still haven't given away the ending.

[Garick Cooke · Rating 2 out of 5]

King's Daughter appeared in 1958, a year after her debut novel, Strange Evil. Gaskell improved her writing in the interim; except for one long, overwrought scene in Chapter 28, the purple prose that bogged down the action of SE has been eliminated in favor of something more readable, if undistinguished. KD appears a less ambitious work than SE. It is a conventionally picaresque tale--that is, a story of a protagonist traveling from place to place, meeting various people and having adventures along the way. This is a classic format, dating back at least to The Odyssey. Another way to describe it would be to say that it is the story of a teenage girl running away from home and trying to grow up, with a heavy dose of romance.

Gaskell would emerge a few years later as a writer of bleak, misanthropic, and sometimes brilliant novels (see The Shiny Narrow Grin, 1964) and occasional pieces of short fiction (the best of these being "The Wooing of Grimhilde", 1960, and "Jane", 1968; she published only six pieces of short fiction, as far as I can discover, as opposed to thirteen novels). This is the fourth novel of hers that I've read, and I will move on next to Attic Summer, if I can find a copy!