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    Devices and Desires: Bess of Hardwick and the Building of Elizabethan England
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    Devices and Desires: Bess of Hardwick and the Building of Elizabethan England
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    Devices and Desires: Bess of Hardwick and the Building of Elizabethan England
    Ebook587 pages12 hours

    Devices and Desires: Bess of Hardwick and the Building of Elizabethan England

    By Kate Hubbard

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    About this ebook

    “A dynamic portrait. . . . Bess of Hardwick emerges from Devices and Desires as a fascinating and influential woman well deserving of many historians’ attention.” — BBC History

    The critically acclaimed author of Serving Victoria brilliantly illuminates the life of the little-known Bess of Hardwick—next to Queen Elizabeth I, the richest and most powerful woman in sixteenth-century England.

    Aided by a quartet of judicious marriages and a shrewd head for business, Bess of Hardwick rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most respected and feared Countesses in Elizabethan England—an entrepreneur who built a family fortune, created glorious houses—the last and greatest built as a widow in her 70s—and was deeply involved in matters of the court, including the custody of Mary Queen of Scots.

    While Bess cultivated many influential courtiers, she also collected numerous enemies. Her embittered fourth husband once called her a woman of “devices and desires,” while nineteenth-century male historians portrayed her as a monster—”a woman of masculine understanding and conduct, proud, furious, selfish and unfeeling.” In the twenty-first century she has been neutered by female historians who recast her as a soft-hearted sort, much maligned, and misunderstood. As Kate Hubbard reveals, the truth of this highly accomplished woman lies somewhere in between: ruthless and scheming, Bess was sentimental and affectionate as well.

    Hubbard draws on more than 230 of Bess’s letters, including correspondence with the Queen and her councilors, fond (and furious) missives between her husbands and children, and notes sharing titillating court gossip. The result is a rich, compelling portrait of a true feminist icon centuries ahead of her time—a complex, formidable, and decidedly modern woman captured in full as never before.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 26, 2019
    ISBN9780062303011
    Author

    Kate Hubbard

    After leaving Oxford University, Kate Hubbard worked variously as a researcher, a teacher, a book reviewer and a publisher’s reader and a freelance editor.  She currently works for the Royal Literary Fund. She is the author of the acclaimed historical biography Serving Victoria and lives in London and Dorset.

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    Reviews for Devices and Desires

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    • 4/5
      Devices and Desires (2019) by Kate Hubbard is non-fiction biography that takes Bess of Hardwick as its subject. Bess isn’t too good about sharing her thoughts, but meticulous in her accounts and frequent in correspondence. She was a consummate builder. Among her projects was the first iteration of Chatsworth House. And she outlived four husbands, each of whom lifted her further up the social scale until Bess was a confident of Queen Elizabeth I and one of the wealthiest women in England.Building projects were Bess’s true passion, particularly Chatsworth House which she began with her second marriage to William Cavendish and continued with funding from her third and fourth husbands. In her discussion of Bess’s projects, Hubbard’s attention diverts to architecture, construction practices, and the men who created great houses of the Elizabethan era.Bess left details of daily life in these lavish houses. At Hardwick in the 1590s, Bess wrote about the sale of cattle and sheep, the blue cloth she bought to make livery, the oysters sent by her son-in-law, the herrings purchased from Hull. The detail is fascinating.Filled with detail of society, marriage politics, domestic arrangements, Devices and Desires is an engaging read, but as non-fiction it can’t lift the people out of their of their documents.