“Why?” a young woman asked me. “Why did you choose to write about Eleanor? And why write her memoirs, rather than biography? Wasn’t it more difficult to write her memoirs?”
“Yes,” I agreed. However, Eleanor of Aquitaine stands among those exceptional women whom history knows. I wrote her memoirs because I believed in reaching — channelling — her person to find what she stood for. I believed in her right to challenge the status quo, telling the dominant male hierarchies of Church and state, “Here I stand!” I believed in her right to intuit the mindset of alpha males so well that she asserted herself among them, moved forward, spelled progress for women, shaped roles for herself, and, at least in part, moved armies and ruled an empire.
That’s why I wrote “Power of a Woman…” in the way it turned out, in effect channelling Eleanor. I believe she needs a hearing. The ‘Why’ of her life is what matters. ‘Why’ motivates her life’s events, her astonishing being. In a world of distrust she believed in herself, setting a model for assertiveness; not only in the past, her past, but for our present.