The Dragon and the Rose [Import] [Paperback]

Roberta Gellis (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Mayflower (January 11, 1979)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0583128769
• ISBN-13: 978-0583128766
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Roberta Gellis has a varied educational background--a master's degree in biochemistry and another in medieval literature--and working history--10 years as a research chemist, many years as a free-lance editor of scientific manuscripts, and more than 40 years as a writer. She is married--to the same man for over 60 years (no mean feat in these days) and lives in Lafayette, Indiana, with her husband Charles and a lively Scottish terrier called Zoe. She has one child, Mark, who teaches Rhetoric (a fancy name for expository writing) at Kettering University in Michigan. Mark is married to Sandra and they have a lovely daughter, Elizabeth.

Gellis has been a successful writer of historical fiction, publishing over 25 meticulously researched historical novels since 1964. The best known of these are The Roselynde Chronicles (ROSELYNDE, ALINOR, JOANNA, GILLIANE, RHIANNON, and SYBELLE). The series has been reprinted many times since its first appearance in 1979, most recently in 2006. Gellis has also been the recipient of many awards, including the Silver and Gold Medal Porgy for historical novels from West Coast Review of Books, the Golden Certificate and Golden Pen from Affaire de Coeur, The Romantic Times Award for Best Novel in the Medieval Period (more than once) and Lifetime Achievement Award for Historical Fantasy, as well as Romance Writers of America's Lifetime Acheivement Award.

More recently Gellis has ventured into other genres, starting with mythological fantasy (DAZZLING BRIGHTNESS, SHIMMERING SPLENDOR, ENCHANTED FIRE, BULL GOD, and THRICE BOUND). Most recently she has written historical fantasy, with a series of book coauthored by Mercedes Lackey set in Elizabethan times (THIS SCEPTER'D ISLE, ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT, BY SLANDEROUS TONGUES, and AND LESS THAN KIND). Before that she was writing historical mysteries, a four-book series set in London and Oxford in 1139 (A MORTAL BANE, A PERSONAL DEVIL, BONE OF CONTENTION and CHAINS OF FOLLY) and one set in the Italian Renaissance in Ferrara (LUCREZIA BORGIA and the MOTHER OF POISONS).

Since Gellis is one of the early addicts to electronic readers---she purchased a RocketeBook way back in 1999---it is no surprise that she was eager to get her own out of print historical romances into electronic format. Cerridwen Press (http://www.cerridwenpress.com) has published the Heiress Series (THE ENGLISH HEIRESS, THE CORNISH HEIRESS, THE KENT HEIRESS, FORTUNE'S BRIDE, and A WOMAN'S ESTATE) as well as the Royal Dynasty Series (don't ask me about that, there isn't a royal or a dynasty in any of the four books---it was a notion of a long-ago agent) SIREN SONG, WINTER SONG, FIRE SONG, and A SILVER MIRROR. Cerridwen offers a variety of formats, one of which can be read by the Kindle and for those too firmly addicted to paper, the books are also available in a very nice Trade edition (but those are rather expensive).

I'm sorry I don't have any amusing anecdotes to relate, as recommended by the Profile, but a writer's life is really very quiet. Sometimes my neighbors ask my husband what has happened to me because they haven't seen me in such a long time. Depending on his humor of the moment, sometimes Charles tells them that I can't come outside because he keeps me chained to my computer---but that isn't true. He lets me get up once in a while.

Roberta Gellis

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It's nice to see Henry VII get some press time, November 30, 2005

By 

Lilly Flora "by Lilo Drandoff" (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: The Dragon and the Rose (Paperback)

Because of the immense fame of his son Henry VII tends to be overlooked by fiction writers. He, after all, only had one wife and didn't behead her, making him comparatively boring. So it's nice to find a novel that focuses solely on him.

The Dragon and the Rose is ostensibly the story of Henry VII, the first Tudor king, and his wife Elizabeth of York, Edward the IV's daughter. Really, it's not. This book focuses mainly on Henry's conquest of England and his battles with Richard III's supporters after he comes to the throne. The romance is pretty much lacking between Henry and Elizabeth except for a few brief bedroom scenes that aren't even all that romantic.

It was nice to learn more about the history of Henry VII, it's something I never knew much about, but this book has some very boring parts where people talk and talk about obscure political going on's. The romance does a little to drag it out of the political muck, but as previously stated, there's not a lot of it.

Henry has a very odd persona in this book. He's described as weak, as constantly crying in private, refusing to eat; in other words he doesn't seem the kind of man to rally the support of a kingdom to him. Elizabeth also seems weak and far too prickly; very differently from how her contemporaries saw her. And Margaret, Henry's mother, never even told him he had a claim to the throne! Which seems ridiculous considering he had to go into hiding in Brittany at the age of fourteen! Obviously he knew he was a potential King, and planned according his whole life!

This book has some frustrating aspects, but overall I give it four stars for the history, three for the characters and three for the overall writing.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars wonderful historical book, with true "period" feel, March 23, 1998

By 

florkow (Vienna, Austria) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Dragon and the Rose (Paperback)

I love Gellis' historical (medieval) romances, she focuses on a love story but always gives rich period detail and the characters do not think or act like present day people but are actually bound by their times, this makes her stories very authentic sounding. At the same time, she manages to make their choices and hardships understandable to us - a real achievement. Although I enjoy her newest series where she writes of mythological (Greek) figures and has more freedom than in writing about historical times, I regret that she is not writing medievals anymore.

I am very happy that I found this out of print title through Amazon, I have been hunting for her old titles for about five years and I am very happy that I finally have all of them!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Humanizing a king, March 22, 2009

By 

Chrijeff (Scranton, PA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Dragon and the Rose (Paperback)

Though most publishers and booksellers consider Gellis a writer of romance, I personally think of her as a historical novelist who happens to insert some romance in her novels (as most historical novelists do). That may be why I read her work at all, when ordinarily I can't stand romance. This novel is a prime example of its appeal to me. It's the story of the early life of Henry VII of England, the first of the Tudor monarchs, beginning with his birth as the posthumous son of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, by his 13-year-old widow, Lady Margaret Beaufort, and following him through his victory over the Earl of Lincoln's rebellion 30 years later. As a great-great-grandson on his mother's side of King Edward III, and on his father's of Henry V's widow, he has a tenuous claim to the throne, and from boyhood he is hunted, betrayed, and attacked by political enemies and those who simply see him as a dangerous lightning rod for their own rivals. When he usurps the throne from Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth and marries Richard's niece, Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Edward IV and sister of the two "Little Princes" murdered in the Tower (see Shakespeare), his position becomes at once better (the English people for the most part love him) and shakier. Though the cover blurb declares that his and Elizabeth's "passion for one another would change the course of history," the two don't even meet till the book is more than half finished, and most of the story is concerned with political maneuvering and battles.

Gellis's great strength is that (although she admits in her afternote that "the emotions accredited to the characters are mostly fictional") she portrays Henry and Elizabeth as human beings, with comprehensible emotions that readers can understand and identify with. Henry is deeply attached to his mother and to his uncle Jasper, his father's older brother, who in fact has been the nearest thing to a father he has ever known; having lived an insecure life, he tends naturally toward suspicion of everyone he meets. Elizabeth is the browbeaten daughter of a tyrannical mother, grieving for the loss of her beloved little brothers, terrified of the uncle who killed them and almost forced her to marry him, yet fearful too of Henry. Indeed, Gellis's moral, if she could be said to have one, would be best expressed as, "Don't keep things to yourself--TALK to your mate and tell him/her what's troubling you!" If Henry and Elizabeth could have brought themselves to express their real motivations early on, their later misunderstandings, suspicions (Henry at one point believes Elizabeth to be implicated in Lincoln's plot), and months of painful adjustment wouldn't have had to happen. Yet in spite of all, they come gradually to genuinely love each other, and if that fact makes the book a romance, so be it. It is, perhaps, a romance for those who don't like romances--like me.