The Fifth Queen

Written by Ford Madox Ford

Narrated by Ralph Cosham

The Fifth Queen is Ford Maddox Ford’s masterful trilogy of historical fiction centered on Katharine Howard, a young girl of a proud, noble, and impoverished family who catches the jaded eye of Henry VIII and becomes his controversial fifth Queen.In this first volume, Katherine arrives at the King's court to find its dimly lit corridors vibrating with corruption and fear, as unscrupulous courtiers hungry for power maneuver for advantage. Clever, beautiful, and outspoken, Katherine soon becomes caught in a web of intrigue and romance as she fights for political and religious change.Ford saw the past as an integral part of the present experience and understanding. His sharply etched vision of the court of Henry VIII, first published in 1908, echoes aspects of Edwardian England as it explores the pervading influence of power, lies, fear, and anxiety on people’s lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackstone Audio
• Release date: Jun 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781441723352

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, and editor. Born in Wimbledon, Ford was the son of Pre-Raphaelite artist Catherine Madox Brown and music critic Francis Hueffer. In 1894, he eloped with his girlfriend Elsie Martindale and eventually settled in Winchelsea, where they lived near Henry James and H. G. Wells. Ford left his wife and two daughters in 1909 for writer Isobel Violet Hunt, with whom he launched The English Review, an influential magazine that published such writers as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence. As Ford Madox Hueffer, he established himself with such novels as The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), cowritten with Joseph Conrad, and The Fifth Queen (1906-1907), a trilogy of historical novels. During the Great War, however, he began using the penname Ford Madox Ford to avoid anti-German sentiment. The Good Soldier (1915), considered by many to be Ford’s masterpiece, earned him a reputation as a leading novelist of his generation and continues to be named among the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Recognized as a pioneering modernist for his poem “Antwerp” (1915) and his tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-1928), Ford was a friend of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. Despite his reputation and influence as an artist and publisher who promoted the early work of some of the greatest English and American writers of his time, Ford has been largely overshadowed by his contemporaries, some of whom took to disparaging him as their own reputations took flight.

Reviews for The Fifth Queen

[bjace_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Historical novels are stories first and factual renderings last. Most historians regard Katherine Howard, the fifth of Henry VIII's wives as a barely-educated flibbertigibbet who may have been a good-time girl. Ford Madox Ford sees her as a ponderous woman of prodigious education whose greatest interest was restoring England to the Catholic faith. He does, however, never answer the question of Katherine's possible sexual misconduct (and thereby leaves himself an out.) More interesting are the depictions of Thomas Cromwell, Henry's Privy Seal (i.e., chief henchman) and his gang of intelligent rogues. Interesting story; fanciful history.

[booksinthebelfrey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel, aptly described by William Gass as "slow, intense, pictorial, and operatic," is a seriously literary historical novel of a sort not much seen anymore (indeed Joseph Conrad, writing of it in 1908, called it "the swan song of Historical Romance"). In it Ford gives us an intriguingly idiosyncratic portrait of Katharine Howard, the ill-fated fifth wife Of Henry VIII (and I use the word "portrait" deliberately, as Ford's prose style is very painterly). Certainly this is not the woman we may think we know from BBC costume dramas or "The Tudors!" It may not be the woman known to historians or her contemporaries either, as Ford I think is less interested in historically accurate depictions of his characters than in fleshing out philosophical and moral arguments about the nature of history itself. Nevertheless, the narrative is dense with period detail, the Tudor language and Latin references are authentically daunting, and the whole enterprise is carried off with masterly skill.The other novels this most puts me in mind of are Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy and Jane Smiley's Greenlanders .... if you enjoyed those, you might well find The Fifth Queen a rewarding reading experience.