The Lady of the Rivers (The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels, #1)

by Philippa Gregory

“She tried to live like an ordinary woman, but some women cannot live an ordinary life. She tried to walk in the common ways, but some women cannot put their feet to that path. This is a man’s world, Jacquetta, and some women cannot march to the beat of a man’s drum. Do you understand?”

“Men command the world that they know,” she says. “Everything that men know, they make their own. Everything that they learn, they claim for themselves. They are like the alchemists who look for the laws that govern the world, and then want to own them and keep them secret. Everything they discover, they hug to themselves; they shape knowledge into their own selfish image. What is left to us women but the realms of the unknown?”