Elizabeth Woodville - in Literature

In Literature

Elizabeth is a character in the plays Richard III and Henry VI Part 3 by William Shakespeare.

Philippa Gregory's 2009 novel The White Queen follows a fictionalized account of Elizabeth's life from meeting her future husband, King Edward, up through the disappearance of her sons and the reign of her brother-in-law, Richard III. The novel places a great deal of focus on the legend of Melusine and Elizabeth and her mother's ties to witchcraft.

Other sympathetic fictional portraits of Elizabeth Woodville include that found in A Secret Alchemy by Emma Darwin (novelist). A less sympathetic picture is given in Sandra Worth's Lady of the Roses (2008) as well as in Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon where she is portrayed as a schemer who is at the very heart of the various conspiracies against Richard III. She is also found in Sharon Kay Penman's The Sunne in Splendour, where she is seen mainly through the eyes of others, and in Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, where she is not evil but too self-centered and too kind to her family. Rosemary Hawley Jarman's fictionalized biography of Elizabeth Woodville is entitled The King's Grey Mare (1972).