Bess of Hardwick and Her Circle

Bess of Hardwick ruled her world with the same iron will she brought to her building projects and her marriages. In an age when women were legally powerless, she accumulated vast estates, built one of the great Elizabethan prodigy houses, and maneuvered through the deadliest court in Europe with a politician's instinct for survival. Maud Stepney Rawson's portrait captures not just the facts of Bess's remarkable life but the texture of her world: the rivalries, the marriages as political treaties, the endless calculations of power in Elizabethan England. This is biography that understands how a woman born with nothing could die as one of the richest and most powerful figures in England, not through birth or royal favor, but through relentless will and shrewd judgment. The book endures because Bess herself endures: a woman who understood that in Tudor England, the personal was always political, and who played the game as well as any man.