We don’t have private letters and diaries, we don't have those behind-the-scenes bits of evidence. I think it's essential to try to interpret what this does to a person from the available evidence. For me that idea was insecurity, by which I don’t mean lack of self-esteem, but the fact that she lived from almost the very beginning of her life in a situation of great risk, great danger, and I think that played itself out both in practical terms – she always had risks to calculate and decisions to make – and also psychologically. I wanted the book to have an idea, to have a theme, to have something that I was trying to say about her life. The book was germinating for a long time, and for me the essence of it was to find the angle, to find the argument. It is sometimes said that it takes longer to write something short than it does to write something long. How do you fit nearly seventy years, and forty-five years on the throne, into what is little more than a pamphlet? The challenge was to make a book out of it and to make it work as a book.Īnd so how did you manage to filter all of that information down? Clearly it is very, very challenging to write that much about some of our monarchs, who were barely there but for Elizabeth the challenge is the other way round. How much of a challenge was it to write a book that was so short?Ģ5,000 words was the limit, which for the book is just under 100 pages.

Your newest book is Elizabeth I: A Study in Insecurity for the Penguin Monarchs series. This year, she graced the fields of Chalke Valley History Festival, and we were lucky enough to catch five minutes to talk to her. Most historians date the end of the Wars to Henry VII's victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field, although it can be argued that they actually finally finished during the sixteenth century., and powerful medieval women. Over the course of 30 years the crown passed through several hands: Henry VI, Edward VI, Edward V, Richard III, and Henry Tudor. She has graced our bookshelves and televisions on the ever-fascinating subjects of Joan of Arc, the Wars of the Roses A series of conflicts, during the second half of the fifteenth century, between two branches of the Plantagenet line: York and Lancaster. Helen Castor is an award-winning historian and Bye-Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

Joan of arc by helen castor