Memory Eternal, Sharon Kay Penman!

The following post has been lifted wholesale from my library-school blog, and gently dropped here for the perusal of any who might be interested:

I found out today that one of  my favorite authors growing up, Sharon Kay Penman, has passed away.

Through her Wars of the Roses-set historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, I discovered the world of Richard III, the Ricardians who passionately stand up for him and try indefatigably to clear his name or at least expose the ambiguity and mystery of history, and the excitement of historical investigation. Penman’s work, from this thick but deliciously readable and romantic tome, to her Welsh Princes trilogy comprising Here Be Dragons, Falls the Shadow, and The Reckoning, was a huge part in what inspired me to love history and want to study it at the undergraduate level.

How much delight she has furnished so many readers! Her books are never dry or boring, always sizzling with the humanity, the romance, the drama we love so well, while being well- and lovingly researched. In fact, readers who really got to know her style might even groan a bit at the set-piece scene that became a cliché in her books: the scene of various medieval women discussing childbirth and the medieval customs surrounding it, looking on it with exploratory and appraising eyes, rather more as a modern woman would look and reflect. If this type of scene became a sort of didactic tool to waken readers to the different times that the Middle Ages were, it worked, and even its ubiquity through various volumes of her work made it look like an old friend. There it is again, the SKP childbirth discussion scene! Rather cosy, if anything.

So, Penman often wrote from women’s points of view with stirring warmth and sympathy, and it made perfect sense for a young woman like me to enjoy and fall into her stories so easily, when we had been told that women did not have much power or presence in detectable history. But she also wrote men with great sympathy and flair. Who can forget the figure of Richard from The Sunne in Splendour? True: instead of an evil gargoyle she made him if anything perhaps too good; but very memorable; and memorable also was the relationship dynamic between Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. And Warwick the Kingmaker, and tragic George of Clarence. How much Wars of the Roses genealogy and history I learned so effortlessly because it was embedded in a beautifully-wrought story! Reading textbooks afterwards on the Wars of the Roses was thereafter infinitely easier (not to mention Shakespeare). This is what good historical fiction can do: hook you, and open up the real world and art to you with more vividness and passion.

And who can read and not fall in love with the Llewelyns of the Welsh Princes books? Perhaps most poignantly with the tragically doomed last prince. My good friend and I were reading these books at the same time and, as I cried when I finished The Sunne in Splendour, my friend admits to crying when she finished The Reckoning. I have often reflected, what would the real historical personages think about these fictionalizations of their life? Surely they would not feel badly, to be remembered in some way so long after, and with such sympathy.

I don’t want to fail to do justice to her other books that I enjoyed, such as When Christ and His Saints Slept, which began another series, this time about the Angevins. This series continued with further volumes about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, which I unfortunately stopped reading after waiting years for The Devil’s Brood to come out. Penman also wrote some medieval mysteries having Eleanor of Aquitaine as a major minor character (if that makes sense).

But I heard today of Sharon Kay Penman’s passing I just wanted to express my gratitude to her, for her, and for her work. In the world of books and libraries, Penman loomed large for me. How often did I check her out from my high school library or my public library! How often did I rush excitedly to the local independent bookstore to obtain my own copy of these books which I so loved to lose myself in. And how amazing that through enjoying myself I also received an education and an impetus to get educated about history, for the sheer excitement and fun of it.

I thought I’d end here with a little link to the amazing story of how they discovered the remains of Richard III in Leicester. If it had not been for Sharon Kay Penman, I would not have cared or known what was happening. I would go further and assert that without people like Sharon Kay Penman, amazing archaeological discoveries like this just would not happen. How else can the public go from being indifferent to a historical cause some 500 years gone, to passionate involvement, against every opposition, to see the excavation through? (If you want to explore this amazing story I would recommend reading about it, it will blow your mind! It did mine, anyway, and does, to this day!) Without that human element, that spice of the imagination, how else could any truly great and mind-blowing discoveries truly be made? That’s something to ponder, if you ask me.