Rain Dodging A Scholar’s Romp through Britain in Search of a Stuart Queen by Susan J. Godwin

 This was a strange juxtaposition of the author’s memoir with her time spent researching Mary of Modena and her travels in Oxford. I found the memoir section quite traumatic, and confronting, because of her mother’s violence, several family tragedies and her troubles with men, including boyfriends and her first husband. As it wasn’t linear, and she told different stories from different time periods, I got extremely confused, and I also wondered why she felt that we needed to learn personal details about her sex life, and men ‘hitting’ on her. It was also written in a slangy way much of the time, and readers might think that I am prudish, but I found the swearing, and intimate details really pretty weird, combined with her time in England and her historical research.

I liked the story about her time in Oxford, and reading about Mary of Modena and her court. However, as Mary had little to do with selecting them, it was hard to tell whether she really was such a big patron of the arts. I couldn’t really see that Mary was even very ‘feminist’ for her time, and I really didn’t learn that much about Mary’s personality at all. I learned far more about Anne Finch, and her poetry.

I received this free ebook from NetGalley in return for an honest review.