num_pages: 64
description: THE BRIDE PRICE is the first in a series of four books about Cecylee Neville (1415-1495), mother of Richard III and Edward IV, Queen by Right and Abbess. This tale of Cecylee’s girlhood will appeal to all who love YA novels.Cecylee is the apple of her mother’s eye. The seventh daughter, she is the only one left unmarried by 1424, the year she turns nine. In her father’s eyes, however, she is merely a valuable pawn in the game of marriage. The Earl of Westmorland plans to marry his youngest daughter to 13-year-old Richard, Duke of York, who is close to the throne. This is a splendid match, for if anything were to happen to three-year-old King Henry, Richard would be King. But Cecylee’s mother, Countess Joan, is not happy at being forced to part with her youngest daughter. She persuades her husband to change the ceremony to a betrothal so that Cecylee can continue to live at home under her mother’s guidance, while her father tutors Richard in the knightly arts. A year later, Cecylee’s father is dead and Countess Joan becomes one of the most powerful magnates of England. Never happy with Richard as her daughter’s suitor, she forces him to leave the day after her husband’s death. Set in the years following the great English victory at Agincourt in 1415, the novel shows Cecylee surrounded by a household of clever and resourceful women who read Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale and other subversive manuscripts, which colors her attitudes about marriage and the role of women. Does she wish to marry Richard? Does she wish to marry at all? For at the age of ten, Cecylee has already experienced too much violence at the hands of men.
language: English
title: The Bride Price
publisher: Spun Stories Press