Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography

This version of a historical figure is not objective at all, and is written from Marion Meade's perspective of Eleanor of Aquitaine's experience. Marion Meade projects onto her subject, her own viewpoint of what it must have been like to have been married to Louis VII. However, it is a focus on a woman nearly 1,000 years ago, from a twentieth-century perspective. Because so much of the book appears to be subjective, if I were doing research on Eleanor of Aquitaine I would rely on other sources. The author, as is noted in biographies on her, was educated as a journalist not a historian, and that shortcoming comes through vividly in her portrayal of an influential historical character. This book can serve as much as romantic or even gothic fiction, as it can for a historical account of a real person. It is as much imagination and unsubstantiated conjecture, as it is history. It is not as much of a female perspective, as it is the author's (Marion Meade's) viewpoint of how she would have felt had she been Eleanor of Aquitaine.