#(which honestly creep me tf out given how young she was when he died and how much older than her he was)

[heartofstanding]

I want to talk about anne neville and Elizabeth of York. I always thought they knew each other very well. They all have vague personalities in the eyes of passers-by, turbulent fates, tragic experiences caused by their father's death, good relations with husbands who have blood feuds indirectly through marriage, and unstable dynasty rule caused by death ... Because of their vague personalities, both women are easily used by historical authors to express their views, and they also have some connections (such as clothes that are often discussed, Elizabeth once had marriage rumors with Edward and Richard in Lancashire ... Their biographies were also criticized by readers as biased (I think this is because these two women are not extroverted, so the author can only imagine themselves ...)I am very frustrated that historical novels mostly use them to shape the men around them, and rarely pay attention to the inner thoughts of "silent" women. I can see some vivid characteristics of these two women in historical literature. One of my favorite facts about Elizabeth of York is that she arranged for her sister to marry her uncle's former supporters, and had a good relationship with the relatives of the Delapol family, which reminded me of her father's attempt to reconcile with Henry Beaufort. Unfortunately, the novels I read do not describe this at all. The marriage between Anne Neville and Richard III is originally described in the novel as Richard saving her, but from her escape from George's supervision, there is reason to believe that they are in a cooperative relationship, as well as Lancaster. Edward, in the novel, is always just an "evil ex husband..." But I think their brief marriage is not so shallow…

I think your frustration with the way Anne Neville and Elizabeth of York are written about is very justified. I'm not very knowledgable about their lives (honestly, I'm a little confused why you sent this to me) but even from a distance, I think they must have been a lot more complex that historians, commentators and novelists typically suppose they were. I think they largely serve as Ricardian mouthpieces now - Anne as Richard III's one true love, tragically lost and Elizabeth as his chief mourner and as another victim of Tudor rule - but it's also very easy to turn them to mouthpieces for Lancaster and Tudor, which was the image that dominated in Tudor times - Shakespeare's depiction of Anne as the chief mourner for Henry VI, the story Richard murdered Anne in order to forcibly marry Elizabeth, the depiction of Elizabeth as purely the idealised, virtuous and dutiful prop for her husband's rule). I think that, because there's a lack of information that lets us build up a more detailed idea of either women, they tend to be written in a way that expresses how the author really feels about the events and personalities of the Wars of the Roses. I can understand this impulse but I wish this impulse was focused more on them as individuals and less on being mouthpieces for the author's feelings about Richard III or Henry VII.