Rosalind Miles

Examines women's contribution to the evolution of the human race, and the female achievement on every level-cultural, commercial domestic, emotional, and social.

Ann Cohen knew her marriage to Marty was never a fairytale romance. After all, a mistress is a character unfamiliar to Cinderella stories. Yet even after the infidelity and wrath that plagued Ann and Marty’s relationship, Ann could never have brought herself to commit the lurid murder of her husband. But while Ann is consumed by the fear of losing her freedom, day after day in the courtroom, someone who framed Ann for this hideous crime is laughing at the irony of it all. Her confidant and attorney Bill Connally promises a triumph in the courtroom, but the more it seems someone is trying to destroy her life, the less a victory seems possible.

Publicly declared a bastard at the age of three, daughter of a disgraced and executed mother, last in the line of succession to the throne of England, Elizabeth I inherited an England ravaged by bloody religious conflict, at war with Spain and France, and badly in debt. When she died in 1603, after a forty-five year reign, her empire spanned two continents and was united under one church, victories in war, and blessed with an overflowing treasury. What's more, her favorites - William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake, and Sir Walter Raleigh - mad made the Elizabethan era a Golden Age still remembered today. But for Elizabeth the woman, tragedy went hand in hand with triumph. Politics and scandal forced the passionate queen to reject her true love, Robert Dudley, and to evacuate his stepson, her much-adored Lord Essex. Now in this spellbinding novel, Rosalind Miles brings to life the woman behind the myth. By turns imperious, brilliant, calculating, vain and witty, this is the Elizabeth the world never knew. Form the days of her brutal father, Henry VIII, to her final dying moments, Elizabeth tells her story in her own words.