The Empress of the Last Days

Astraea #3

by Jane Stevenson

This is a novel of many an interracial love story that is also a scholarly detective tale. A young Oxford don named Michael Foxwist and a group of his academic friends come upon a collection of dusty old documents; they are intrigued to learn of the clandestine seventeenth-century marriage of the black prince Pelagius and Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia. With mounting excitement, they discover that the true queen of England may not be the familiar dowdy elderly woman of German extraction but a young and gifted black scientist of independent mind. She lives in Barbados and is the last surviving descendant of Elizabeth and Pelagius. Michael confronts her with her heritage only to find that she refuses to be the child of destiny and insists on being herself. But their meeting changes everything - they fall in love. Of different race, nationality, and temperament, they must re-examine all their assumptions and the terms on which they live.
Though written to be read independently, The Empress of the Last Days is also the conclusion to Jane Stevenson's acclaimed historical trilogy, companion to The Winter Queen and The Shadow King.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction

360 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Dr. Jane Stevenson (born 1959) is a UK author who was born in London and brought up in London, Beijing and Bonn. She has lectured in history at Sheffield University, and teaches literature and history at the University of Aberdeen. Her fiction books include Several Deceptions, a collection of four novellas; a novel, London Bridges; and the historical trilogy made up of the novels The Winter Queen, The Shadow King, and The Empress of the Last Days. Stevenson lives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

Her academic publications include Women Latin Poets (Oxford University Press), Early Modern Women Poets with Peter Davidson (Oxford University Press) and The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby, co-edited with Peter Davidson (Prospect Books).

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed the first two books in this trilogy (the second one in particular), but this was a disappointment, and doubly so because it is "the final word," in effect, in the saga of Pelagius and his son Balthasar. It started out well, a sort of academic detective story, in which a graduate student in Utrecht is called in to assess a cache of papers found in the city of Middelburg in the Netherlands. We know right away of course that these are historical documents related to the characters of the first two books. But they don't know that. The documents pass into the hands of various scholars, each with a different specialty, and it is fascinating to watch them try to deconstruct the texts - and the relationships of their authors. They don't always get it right, and we know things they don't know, having read the first two books in the series. I loved that perspective and found it fascinating to follow the process of these modern-day scholars poring over these texts to extract meaning and significance - historical, political, personal - from them. The discovery and research is set against the backdrop of tangled university politics, which (since I work at one) I always find interesting. But then the book goes slack when one of the young scholars (at Oxford) follows the thread of the ex-slave Pelagius's secret marriage to Elizabeth Stuart, queen of Bohemia, and their son down through the centuries to a remaining descendant on the island of Barbados in this century and he falls in love with her. It turns into a strained, vapid love story for the last half of the book.

[Carol · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book concludes the series that started with The Winter Queen, and, unfortunately, it was a disappointment. Instead of continuing with the historical setting, Stevenson jumps ahead to the present to follow a group of English and Dutch scholars who stumble on the documents generated by the characters of the first two books and begin to research the people and events they illuminate. Stevenson has a lot of points to make about academia, race, gender, the nature of royalty, and colonialism, a lot of which is quite interesting. However, it all ends up being rather tiresome. She's too self-conscious about it all. Instead of using the plot and her characters' actions and reactions, she too often just has the people indulge in pedantic inner or outer monologue. Also, there's very little development of the characters or their ideas. They expound about issues with very little changes, shifts, or discoveries regarding their views. It seemed to me that everyone was talking about things they had known, decided, or realized well before the beginning of the novel, not things they had learned or changed their minds about.

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was quite different than the other books in this trilogy. Here (a la A. S. Byatt's Possession) a team of scholars find a set of documents that allow them to uncover the story Stevenson told in the first two volumes. It would stand on its own, but it's fun to watch the principal characters pursue false leads, etc. And here the theme about race & status (and, to a lesser extent, gender) is more pronounced, more overtly discussed, than in the earlier volumes. I really enjoyed this set of books, but because it is so heady, it's difficult to recommend to most of my reading friends. Oh, yeah, the other thing that impressed me about this last volume is that, as the first one took seriously religious views & language that are mostly lost, & the second got inside the clash of scientific & practical approaches to medicine, this one conveys clearly, insightfully, &, to some extent, sympathetically, contemporary academic politics, with its benefits & costs to intellectual life--a theme usually treated only in satires . . . and a theme, again, not calculated to appeal to the masses.

[Diane Standish · Rating 3 out of 5]

the ending left me unsatisfied, but the series was well worth reading

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book because I searched the library cataloge for "Barbados" since we're planning to go. This was the only fiction book returned. In it, some researchers in Europe find evidence that there is a secret line of descendents of an English queen, thus the true Queen of England is today a professor in Barbados.

It was nice to read descriptions of the characters moving around the island. In a way that's easier than reading a guide book in terms of getting a feel of the island.

I think the author has previously written books about these characters and it probably would have helped if I'd read them first. I didn't feel much attachment to them through this book.