Watch the Lady
Watch the Lady tells of Lady Penelope Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex’s smarter sister and the inspiration for Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella. The focus is on Penelope’s struggle to keep her beautiful but impulsive brother, Essex, from the slimy clutches of Queen Elizabeth I’s chief advisor, Lord Cecil. Lord Cecil, blinded by his envy of Essex, will go to any length to destroy him. Penelope outmaneuvers the wily Cecil, but her attempts to keep her family in the royal favor are frustrated by her brother’s unsuccessful rebellion against the Queen. Penelope uses her formidable wit, connections, and wealth to salvage the situation and keep the Devereux family in the Queen’s good graces.
At more than 500 pages, this story could have used an editor to cut many repetitious elements, and to help with character attributions. When Penelope speaks of her “father,” it is not always clear whether she means her natural father, her stepfather, the Earl of Leicester, or her mother’s third husband, Christopher Blount. A family tree or a list of characters would help immensely.
Flashbacks and flash-forwards are very tricky, and Ms. Fremantle indulges in them to the point that a reader suffers temporal whiplash. In the final chapter, for example, the narrative goes on a dizzying joyride through time. First Penelope has a chinwag with her dead brother, who morphs into her nephew, the new Earl of Essex. The story flashes forward to the coronation of James I in 1603, then flashes back to her Essex’s execution in 1601, and then fast-forwards to 1603 for a paragraph – and then flashes back to 1601. This MTV-like editing paradoxically slows the story down because it disorients the reader.
