Getting to know you: The life of a French princess revealed
Tracy Ryan’s latest novel is the second volume of a series that is drawing favourable comparison’s with Hilary Mantel’s lauded historical fiction.
Just as science fiction -once dismissed as merely popular – is enjoying growing literary acceptance, historical fiction is now also widely and critically recognised.
Like science fiction, historical fiction can speak to the present moment without necessarily responding directly to the most recent news headline or Twitter (X) feud. It can also be a means of formal experimentation or of inspiring empathy and identification with characters over time.
The best writers of historical fiction use historical settings to rewrite history and to better expand our understanding of who and what is at the heart of the stories we already know. So, too, do they better acquaint us with what might have been the inner worlds of people who lived rich, complicated lives and are no longer around to speak of them directly.
Still, despite its contemporary popularity, historical fiction hasn’t always been embraced. Dame Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize twice for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both volumes in her historical literary trilogy about the life and times of the Earl of Essex, Thomas Cromwell. However, she struggled to place with publishers the first novel she ever wrote, set during the French Revolution and called A Place of Greater Safety.
That novel, in 1979, was initially deemed “too historical” and was eventually published in 1992.
“I was told nobody would want to read it because it was too historical and incorporated too much biography,” Mantel, many years later, reflected on the torturous path to publication. “Thankfully, that changed and publishers came to see it in a more advantageous light. People enjoyed a work that was historical and biographical and blended elements of both kinds of books together with the world of fiction writing.”
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In 2023, almost 50 years after Mantel’s sprawling historical novel saw the light of day, Western Australian writer Tracy Ryan quietly published one of that year’s finest novels through independent Australian publisher, Transit Lounge. The Queen’s Apprenticeship told the story of Marguerite, sister of Francois I of France, and the eventual Queen of Navarre. It was the first volume in a projected trilogy, The Queens of Navarre.
Combining extensive historical research with the genre of literary fiction, the novel expertly and beautifully captures Marguerite’s voice and tells her story in sumptuous, highly detailed prose that utterly immerses the reader in a world that Ryan created so flawlessly that reading her words feels like a sensory experience – each sentence perfectly conjuring the sounds, smells and intricate details of Marguerite’s day-to-day life, with vividness and assurance.
Now comes the second volume in the trilogy, The War Within Me, narrated from the strong-willed and single-minded perspective of 16th century Princess Jeanne d’Albret, niece of the King of France and daughter of Marguerite de Navarre and Henri d’Albret, the King of Navarre.
In the sole definitive biography of Jeanne, written by historian Nancy Lyman Roelker and published in 1969, she emerges as a somewhat unlovable woman, of admirable qualities but unattractive character, with a reputation for being “difficult”.
This is perhaps unsurprising, given the pre-feminist, male-dominated tradition of patriarchal historiography in which Roelker was writing and the time at which her book was published.
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Thankfully, Ryan has turned her considerable research skills – and fluency in French – to consulting the breadth and depth of historical sources, many drawn directly from French archives, with which she infuses her work of literary fiction to produce a more well-rounded and insightful portrayal of the woman Princess Jeanne might have been.
Traversing Princess Jeanne’s entire life, The War Within Me begins in 1541, during her girlhood as a young princess, and follows her into adulthood, taking the reader through her entire journey from childhood to young womanhood to maturation and, eventually, death.
Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, Ryan breathes life into the princess, neither explicitly rejecting nor embracing the twin mythologies that have risen in scholarship about her: namely that, yes, she was queen but she was primarily the caring, nurturing mother of Henri IV, creator of a united nation of France; or that of a less maternal, more militant Queen Jeanne, whose dedication to the Reformed cause, following the death of her husband, Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Vendome, became determined to the point of fanaticism.
Ryan’s interests lie primarily in Jeanne the woman, the statesman and the Calvinist. With unsurpassed skill, she explores the many vicissitudes of an undeniably complicated life and offers insights into how Jeanne might have felt and thought as she expertly describes her youth; her initially happy first marriage to Willem, Duke of Julich-Cleves-Berg, that soon floundered; her eventual remarriage to Antoine and role as a leader of the Huguenot party; her relationships with her children – Henri and Catherine – as well as those with the Catholic popes, the Guises and the wily Queen Mother of France, Catherine de Medicis, and the many religious and historical upheavals through which she lived.
With its fluid, engaging, richly conjured prose and storylines and character studies that are so obviously underpinned by exemplary research, The War Within Me lives up to the immense promise of The Queen’s Apprenticeship, with Ryan ultimately creating a fully-realised portrait of Jeanne d’Albret that wholly convinces in its first-person narration and evocation of the age in which she lived, making the reader feel they close the book better “knowing” Princess Jeanne.
This is a work of literary historical fiction, to be sure, but it is assuredly informed by the twin disciplines of history and biography, and both make Ryan’s story infinitely richer and more multifaceted.
The forthcoming concluding volume in the trilogy, To Share His Fortune, focuses on telling the story of Princess Marguerite – widely known as Margo – who was the bride of Jeanne’s son, Henri, and the next Queen of Navarre. This reader eagerly awaits its arrival.
The War Within Me by Tracy Ryan, Transit Lounge Publishing, $34.99