Today's post is on Devices and Desires: Bess of Harkwick and the Building of Elizabethan England by Kate Hubbard. it is 384 pages long including notes and is published by Harper Collins. The intended reader is someone who likes Elizabethan history and architecture. There is mild foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. The cover is dark red with Elizabeth Shrewbury monogram in the center. There Be Spoilers Ahead.
From the back of the book- The critically acclaimed author of Serving Victoria brilliantly illuminates the life of the little-known Bess of Hardwick—next to Queen Elizabeth I, the richest and most powerful woman in sixteenth-century England.
Aided by a quartet of judicious marriages and a shrewd head for business, Bess of Hardwick rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most respected and feared Countesses in Elizabethan England—an entrepreneur who built a family fortune, created glorious houses—the last and greatest built as a widow in the 70s—and was deeply involved in matters of the court, including the custody of Mary Queen of Scots.
While Bess cultivated many influential courtiers, she also collected numerous enemies. Her embittered fourth husband once called her a woman of “devices and desires,” while nineteenth-century male historians portrayed her as a monster—”a woman of masculine understanding and conduct, proud, furious, selfish and unfeeling.” In the twenty-first century she has been neutered by female historians who recast her as a soft-hearted sort, much maligned, and misunderstood. As Kate Hubbard reveals, the truth of this highly accomplished woman lies somewhere in between: ruthless and scheming, Bess was sentimental and affectionate as well.
Hubbard draws on more than 230 of Bess’s letters, including correspondence with the Queen and her councilors, fond (and furious) missives between her husbands and children, and notes sharing titillating court gossip. The result is a rich, compelling portrait of a true feminist icon centuries ahead of her time—a complex, formidable, and decidedly modern woman captured in full as never before.
Review- An interesting history of both a woman and a building but at times can very hard to stay engaged with. Hubbard gives the reader an in dept look into the life of a woman who to controlled her own life and her money in a time when that was hard to do so. Starting at her birth, the reader follow Bess of Hardwick through her marriages, children, scandals, and her buildings. She had a passion for buildings and how they were made, she wanted to have something just for herself and no man had control of it. She lived during some very tumultuous times but she survived and worked to make the best of whatever situation she found herself in from deaths of children to caring for Mary, Queen of Scots for years. With the building of Chatsworth always in the background of her life, Bess worked to make something that would stand forever, it possible. Lots of details, lots of people, and lots of buildings are talked about in this book, so keep that in mind if you give this one a read.
I give this book a Three out of Five stars.
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