Elizabeth of York: The Last White Rose, by Alison Weir

There was no question of marriage but they remained on good, if infrequent, terms for the rest of his life; in times of great need, he helped her out. He also warned her against marrying a Dutch charmer, fraudster, would-be writer and (unbeknownst to her) bigamist called Lenglet. They settled in Paris, where she had a son, who died at three weeks of pneumonia – possibly owing to neglect – and later a daughter, who lived.

Lenglet, by then wanted for embezzlement, fled Paris. She tried unsuccessfully to sell his short stories and was introduced to Ford Madox Ford, editor of the influential Transatlantic Review. But Ford was much more interested in Rhys’s own unpublished stories and draft novel. He had an unerring eye for good writing, and swiftly got her into print.

Although a generation older, he got her into bed too – or maybe she got him. This was 1920s Paris, and Ford was living with the Australian artist Stella Bowen and their daughter. Rhys’s intervention broke up that relationship, though Seymour suggests there may have been a bit of a threesome going on.

It’s not clear. Ford never kissed and told in any of his relationships. Bowen gives a plausibly straight account in her memoir, Drawn from Life, while Rhys’s perspective has to be reconstructed from her novels and stories, especially the latter. Whatever the full story, the one clear result was that Ford’s belief in her set her on the path to literary greatness.

One of the many strengths of this biography is that Seymour is aware of the danger of the too-easy read-across from fiction to life, while being alive to the hidden truths of literary archaeology. Rhys was – and too often still is – ‘judged by the fictitious alter egos whom she created, but only in part resembled’.

She mined elements of herself and her life for her vulnerable women characters – ever alone, ever adrift, failing to find refuge – but they were neither selfportraits nor history. ‘I wasn’t always the abandoned one, you know,’ she wrote.

In fact, Seymour’s relationship with her subject is partly what makes this a gem of literary biography. She maintains the taut, necessary balance between empathy and detachment. On the one hand, her subject was a sensitive, vulnerable soul, generous, charming, irresistibly flirtatious, wryly funny and hugely gifted; on the other, she was endlessly self-absorbed and wholly inconsiderate of others.

Her promising literary career faltered in the 1930s and it was 30 years before she submitted another novel for

‘Our prices have to be high because our chef doesn’t have his own TV show’

publication – by which time she was thought to be dead. During those years, she led a pretty rackety existence, fuelled by alcohol and marked by two more marriages (not bad ones), a couple of spells in mental asylums, a brief sojourn in prison and intermittent public rages, in which she kicked, spat, cursed and bit.

The law was lenient, as were a surprising number of friends and neighbours. But not all: a rural vicar’s wife, confronted by a foul-mouthed, hysterical Rhys in the rectory garden, ‘acting with imaginable satisfaction, gave the unapologetically contrary guest a hard slap across the face’. It worked.

Rhys spent the last 19 years of her life in a tiny bungalow in a Devonshire village, years sweetened and enriched in every sense by literary lionising following her best-known novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. Encouraged and indulged by, among many others, Wyndham Lewis and Diana Athill, she basked in the recognition her writing deserved.

As Seymour acutely points out, she had a genius for creating a ‘world that is both uniquely alien and recognisably mundane’. However, her ‘unforgiving solipsism’ was at once the strength and the limitation of her writing. As she said of herself, ‘With this eye, I see and no other. I cannot see with other people’s eyes.’

Hers were good enough.

DAVID HORSPOOL Elizabeth of York: The Last White Rose By Alison Weir Headline £20

In February 1485, Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, wrote a letter to the Duke of Norfolk. Elizabeth had, along with her brothers and her mother, been dispossessed and dishonoured by her uncle, Richard. He had declared his brother’s offspring illegitimate and marriage false as a preface to – or a pretext for – seizing the throne himself.

Nobody had seen Elizabeth’s younger brothers for months. Many assumed Richard had done away with them, as he had with Elizabeth’s maternal uncle Rivers, her half-brother Richard Grey and her father’s right-hand man Lord Hastings. Now Richard III’s wife, Anne, was sick, and it was rumoured that Richard was planning to marry his niece Elizabeth after her death.

Given that background, you might assume Elizabeth’s letter to her ally Norfolk would say something like ‘Help, my murderous creep of an uncle has his eye on me. Please warn him off.’

What Elizabeth actually wrote was a request that Norfolk act, in the words of a 17th-century historian, as a ‘mediator for her in the cause of the marriage to the King, who … was her only joy and maker in this world, and that she was his in heart and thoughts, in body, and in all’.

Later historians have treated the letter with caution. The only record of it is the version quoted above. Richard publicly denied he ever had plans to marry his niece, and was in fact seeking a match for her elsewhere. But, in any case, the idea of Elizabeth welcoming such a relationship seems abhorrent.

Alison Weir, the author of popular histories of the Tudor period as well as 12 historical novels, knows all this. While the historian might find reasons this peculiar letter can’t be genuine, it’s too juicy a piece of evidence for a novelist to pass up.

Her task, then, is to make the bizarre seem plausible, to convince us that a flesh-and-blood Elizabeth really wrote such a letter. How does Weir do it? Like this: Elizabeth thought ‘it was a far leap from just coming to court to marrying the man who, until recently, she had seen as a wicked child-murderer… But her old love for him, long suppressed and then replaced by hatred, still bubbled beneath the surface.’

Perhaps it was like that. Perhaps a young woman who had known her uncle as a child (though not very well, as he was mostly away in the north) really made this simple calculus of rationalism and emotion to contemplate her withered affection transforming into sexual love. Weir deals with that, too: ‘So what if he had a twisted back? It was not evident through his clothes and, anyway, it was the man who counted, not the body.’