Imagined London by Anna Quindlen Page A

a great novel with a young girl at its center, and the happiest of endings for some of us who were beginning to feel the talons of worldly ambitions clawing at our midsections, later summed up in the pop feminist slogan: I am my own prince.Although, in Elizabeth’s case, it might more properly have been: I am my own queen. And that of most of the known world.
    But like so many of the most compelling English novels, the story of Elizabeth threw out tendrils that led to other engrossing tales. As Trollope’s novels of Parliamentarian intrigue led one to the other, with characters entering and departing the dance and some, like Plantagenet Palliser and his wife, the spirited Lady Glencora, appearing as perennials, growing older, wiser, or perhaps only cannier, so Elizabeth’s story led backward and forward to others. The young Henry, loving his brother’s widow, then casting her off for someone younger and wilder. The younger, wilder Anne Boleyn, holding the King at arm’s length, then succumbing, finally disappearing into the Tower, telling the executioner, according to legend, that he needn’t worry, that she had a little neck. And Elizabeth’s siblings, the unhappy and pious Lady Mary and the sickly and short-lived Edward. Later there would be the fops and intrigues of the Restoration, and the offspring of Victoria, populating the palaces of the world. These were sagas, too, but none of them could hold a candle to that of the Tudors and the redheaded goddess at the center of their story.
    And that was despite the fact that, for young people’s consumption, these histories of the time glossed over the more provocative, uglier facts. None of the stories of the young Elizabeth checked out from my Catholic school library were explicit about her parent’s marriage, driven by lust, or their schism, in which Anne was accused of having sex with, among others, her own brother. None told of how Elizabeth’s last stepmother married a nobleman who may have molested the girl, or of how she dangled her virginity in front of every reigning monarch in Europe to keep the region in a state of dizzy disequilibrium. In all those books Elizabeth was described as she liked to describe herself, the Virgin Queen, but to a child raised on the Virgin Mary, this seemed to have less to do with sex and more with importance and position.
    Yet all the stories seemed to have one plot twist in common, and that was that London was the prize. When Catherine of Aragon, past her childbearing years, was discarded by her now-aged boy king, she was sent from the city. When Elizabeth was displaced by the disgrace of her mother and the birth of her brother, she was sent away as well, out to the English countryside. In rural beauty, becalmed, she awaited the summons back. To be restored to London was to be restored to the place where her mother Anne had reached the zenith of hershort career: arrived at the Tower while the Thames teamed with gaudily decorated boats, rode through the streets in a litter of cloth of gold dressed in ermine and jewels, was crowned in Westminster Abbey while all the lords and ladies of the court looked on. To return to London was to return to life—a life of color, confusion, intrigue, crosscurrents, but a life fully lived.
    Of course, not everyone felt that way, then and now. English literature, and English life, are filled with those who are overwhelmed, exhausted, and repelled by life in the cheek-by-jowl metropolis, not the least of them reigning monarchs. Prince Charles is said to be more at home in his gardens at Highgrove, his country estate, than he is in the palatial quarters he occupies in central London. His mother the Queen looks most herself in photographs when she is pictured in the country, a scarf tied over her hair, Wellington boots on her feet, and a pack of dogs eddying around her. In fact, many of the pleasures of English life we foreigners have learned about through books tend