The Queen of Bushy House
This is a Regency novel centred on two women connected by William, Duke of Clarence, the future William IV.
Dorothea Jordan, the celebrated actress who was William’s companion for fifteen years and bore him ten children, has shared his life at Bushy House before their relationship collapses. A few years later, Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen arrives in England to marry the scandal-shadowed duke, expected not only to produce a legitimate heir but also to negotiate the complexities of his existing family.
Gartland intertwines the stories of Dorothea and Adelaide, women who never met, using Bushy House itself as the point of connection. Through them, she explores motherhood, legitimacy, reputation, abandonment and the precarious position of women within both royal and theatrical society.
Gartland is a clear, accessible and strongly visual writer. She is particularly effective at using concrete physical detail – food, clothing, interiors, cold and bodily discomfort – to establish period and atmosphere. Her settings gain their force from small, vivid particulars rather than authorial explanation.
She is equally good at placing private lives within larger historical events and moving between domestic relationships and wider social pressures. The prose is straightforward and dialogue-driven, giving the novel considerable narrative pace. Occasionally emotions are stated rather too explicitly, and some descriptive effects are repeated, but these are minor reservations. The result is warm, humane and highly readable historical fiction, transforming a potentially complicated royal ménage into an intimate study of two very different women shaped by the same man and the same house.
