When I was a little child, I pined for a red silk skirt.
I do not remember all the emotions of my childhood, but
I remember this childish longing well. One of my
many cousins came to visit us when I was five years
old, and she had a skirt of fine semi-transparent patterned
red silk, lined with a plain red silk shk8rt of a slightly
darker shade. It was very striking. The gauzy texture
was at once soft and stiff, and the colour was bold. That
skirt spoke to my girlish heart. I wanted one like it, but I
knew that my family was not as wealthy as my mother's sister's family,
so I checked my desire. My aunt and cousin came
to envy me my destiny, and all its lavish trimmings - well,
for a time I believed they envied me. For my desire was fulfilled,
but no good came of it, and it brought me no happiness
Two hundred years after being plucked form obscurity to marry the
Crown Prince of Korea, the Red Queen doesn't want her extraordinary
existence to be forgotten. Her long and privileged life behind
the Korean palace walls was not all it seemed, and the Red Queen (or her ghost)
is still desperate to retell her tale.
Dr Babs Halliwell, with her own complicated past, seems the perfect envoy -
having read the memoirs of the Crown Princess on the plane to Seoul,
Babs has become utterly engrossed in her story. But why has the
Red Queen picked Babs to keep her story alive, and what else
does she want from her?
Set in 18th-centruy Korea and the present day, The Red Queen is a rich,
playful and atmospheric novel about love, about personal and public history,
and what it means to be remembered.
Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge.
She was awarded a CBE in 1980. Her many novels include the trilogy The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989)
and The Gates of Ivory (1991), along with The Peppered Moth (2000) and The Seven Sisters (2002),
all of which were published by Viking and Penguin. Among her non-fiction works are Arnold Bennett: A Biography (1974), The Oxford
Companion to English Literature (1985, 2000, edited) and Angus Wilson: A Biography (1995).
Margaret Drabble is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd and lives in London.
|
