Katherine accepts her lot without complaint. The people at court, including Katherine’s sister Philippa, are amazed at Katherine’s good fortune that a landed knight would desire to marry a penniless orphan. The Duke of Lancaster rescues her from the attempted rape-this is the first time they meet-and arranges her marriage. Although she has visions of handsome squires, she ends up being forced to marry an ugly knight, Hugh Swynford, who tried to rape her.
The novel begins when 15-year-old Katherine, an orphan ward of the queen, is leaving the convent at which she has spent five years to return to the royal court, where she hopes the queen will arrange her marriage. That’s what this novel focuses on, so Seton had to do a lot of imagining. Nevertheless, very little is known about Katherine, and nothing has come down to us about her emotional life. Katherine was, like many of Anya Seton’s novels, a bestseller when it was first published, and is still a well-known historical novel.Īnya Seton begins her “Author’s Note” by noting that “it has throughout been my anxious endeavor to use nothing but historical fact when these facts are known.” She apparently did a great deal of research to dig up as many facts as she could. Katherine and John are ancestors to King Henry VII and to the current royal family.
Since I don’t know much British history, I looked up these two names. Katherine, first published in 1954, is the story of Katherine Swynford, mistress and then wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.
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