Amenable Women
By (Author) Mavis Cheek
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
2nd April 2009
Main
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.914
336
Width 126mm, Height 198mm, Spine 22mm
278g
Flora Chapman is in her fifties when he husband dies in a bizarre ballooning accident. Seizing upon her new-found freedom, she decides to finish the history of their village that Edward had begun. A reference to Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII's fourth wife who he rejected for being ugly, captures her imagination as she begins to delve deeper into the life of this neglected figure. Meanwhile, in the Louvre, Holbein's portrait of Anne of Cleves senses the tug of a connection and she begins to tell the story of the injustices she suffered and just how she survived her marriage .
Mavis Cheek was born and grew up in Wimbledon. She began her working life at Editions Alecto, the contemporary art publishers. After Alecto, she attended Hillcroft College for Women from where she graduated in Arts. After her daughter Bella was born, she began her writing career in earnest; journalism and travel writing at first, then short stories, and eventually, in 1988, her novel Pause Between Acts won the She/John Menzies First Novel Prize. Amenable Women is her thirteenth novel. She lives and writes in the heart of the English countryside.