Customer Reviews

Maid of Honour: A Novel Set in the Court of Mary Queen of Scots

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This novel is an odd companion piece to "Immortal Queen," Byrd's brilliant 1956 novel about Mary Queen of Scots. I say "odd" because it is a virtual retelling of "Queen," except while the earlier novel was told from Mary's viewpoint, "Maid" is "told" by Mary Seton, one of the Queen's maids-of honor.

There are obvious disadvantages to this method of telling Mary's story, namely, that everything of interest in the novel is related to the reader by second-hand. We are "shown" only a surface glimpse of Mary's life, and to try and compensate, Byrd throws in a throughly pointless subplot concerning Seton's (completely fictitious) love for a priest. If Byrd found it so impossible to leave the subject of Mary alone, she would have been better advised to have used a more satisfying method of retelling the story.

That said, however, while this is no "Immortal Queen," "Maid of Honour" is still far superior to the usual examples of Marian fiction, which, (with a few exceptions) tend to range from mediocre to godawful.