It is set in the Elizabethan era and beginning of the Stuart period of England, telling the life story of Sir Walter Raleigh, primarily through the viewpoint of his wife, Bess Throckmorton. This is the first of Sutcliff’s five novels written and listed as expressly for ‘adult’ readership,[1] and like her later 1967 adult novel The Flowers of Adonis, uses the technique of having the central character’s narrative told by his relation to other characters.

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