I was working on something else when I stumbled on Eleanor, read part of her life, and was smitten. It wasn’t sufficient to write another biography along the lines of biographers Amy Kelly and Régine Pernoud. (Pernoud was born in the shadow of the Plantagenet’s treasure castle, the Chateau Chinon.) By definition, a biography written in the third person studies its subject from the outside looking in. I reasoned it would be better to write Eleanor’s memoirs as if channeling her life from the inside, looking out.
Twenty years ago the British novelist John Fowles did me the honor of writing the foreword to one of my books. In his novel “Daniel Martin,” Fowles comments that, to attain a degree of accomplishment, a writer has to be able to express thoughts from the other gender’s point of view. So, in contemplating the life of Eleanor, the next challenge was to project her life and personality. In this respect reviewers have been kind.
To help this process I commissioned two portraits, both of them based on the sculpted head of Eleanor twinned with her second husband, the future Henry II of England. Henry and Eleanor adorn a capital in the Metropolitan Museum’s Cloisters, in New York. The first portrait, Copyright by Duncan Long of Kansas City, puts flesh on the stone of the thirty year old Eleanor depicted in the Cloisters carving. This is the Eleanor whom troubadours celebrated “from the Rhine to the western sea.” The second image is less kind. I asked forensic artist David Major of Toronto to add fifty years to the bust at the Cloisters. David gave me Eleanor in old age (Copyright David Major) – but this may be the more important portrait of the two. The subject of this portrait is the eighty-one year old woman who dictates her very long life of triumphs and tragedies onto the pages of “Power of a Woman…”
May “Power of a Woman” carry you, readers, into an unfamiliar, medieval world, and bring you safely home.
With my best wishes,
Robert