She was indeed a Queen. Born a peasant in thirteenth-century Burma, Queen Saw--young, beautiful, and extremely intelligent--reigned beside two kings. Everything luxuriantly cruel or voluptuously lovely swirled around the royal White Umbrella: mandarins, oracle-eating tigers, murdersome intrigue, egg-sized emeralds, concubines, fearsome magic, Tartars, and groveling courtiers (with elbows calloused as thickly as the soles of their feet). Queen Saw happily survived all--her two husbands as well as the Mongol invasion. Wonderful in its details and historical lore, the chief enchantment of She Was a Queen is the storytelling style of Maurice Collis. A book by him, Eudora Welty noted, "is as strategically put together and as fantastically simple as a fairy tale; and it affects us, quite aside from the scholarship of Mr. Collis, with that true belief we gave fairy tales when children."
| ISBN: | 9780811211697 |
| Publication date: | 25th July 1991 |
| Author: | Maurice Collis |
| Publisher: | New Directions Books an imprint of New Directions |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 301 pages |
| Series: | New Directions Paperbook |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers |
She was indeed a Queen. Born a peasant in thirteenth-century Burma, Queen Saw--young, beautiful, and extremely intelligent--reigned beside two kings. Everything luxuriantly cruel or voluptuously lovely swirled around the royal White Umbrella: mandarins, oracle-eating tigers, murdersome intrigue, egg-sized emeralds, concubines, fearsome magic, Tartars, and groveling courtiers (with elbows calloused as thickly as the soles of their feet). Queen Saw happily survived all--her two husbands as well as the Mongol invasion. Wonderful in its details and historical lore, the chief enchantment of She Was a Queen is the storytelling style of Maurice Collis. A book by him, Eudora Welty noted, "is as strategically put together and as fantastically simple as a fairy tale; and it affects us, quite aside from the scholarship of Mr. Collis, with that true belief we gave fairy tales when children."
She Was a Queen features in the following genres: Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
She Was a Queen is available in Paperback
She Was a Queen was written by Maurice Collis and published by New Directions Books an imprint of New Directions
She Was a Queen has 301 pages
Yes it is part of New Directions Paperbook series