“I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear’s wife. I am here.”

This story is an imagining of the life of King Lear’s wife. She is only briefly mentioned in Shakespeare’s play and is said to be deceased. Learwife brings her vividly to life. King Lear and her three daughters (Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia) are dead. Queen Lear has been exiled to an abbey for the past fifteen years. We eventually discover the reason for her banishment.

We spend the entire book in the queen’s head. We are privy to her thoughts, dreams, memories, feelings, and mental decline. The narrative is stream-of-consciousness, shifting backward and forward in time. We listen to her interactions with the nuns and the abbess. The queen is not a pleasant woman. She is cunning and manipulative, and we begin to understand why the two eldest daughters turned out as they did.

The writing is operatic and evokes a period of long ago – it is not quite Shakespearean but is a modernized version. This writing style is effective in creating the atmosphere of isolation and bitterness. For example: “Holy girls in torchlight, scraped open with fear. Perhaps they think I have tentacles, snake-throat, a black tongue. I would bare my teeth at them; I would be mythic.”

This is a beautiful and creative piece of writing. It is character-driven and slow in developing. It is more about adding to the original play. Themes include loss, grief, power, and the role of women of the time to bear a male heir. Familiarity with Shakespeare’s King Lear is essential to the enjoyment of this novel.
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