I gave this book a quick try, and ultimately decided to DNF -- my tastes have changed since I requested this. Many thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book!

Sarah Churchill, 1st Duchess of Marlborough, is remembered as the glamorous and controversial favourite of Queen Anne, and thus became the object of hundreds of satires, newspaper articles and publications during her lifetime and after. Through her intimate friendship with Anne, Sarah wielded great power and influence for many years, but when their relationship very publicly soured, she suffered a slow, painful fall from grace. During which time she began to blackmail Anne with letters revealing their intimacy and accusing her of lesbianism – including with Sarah’s own cousin Abigail Masham, who had replaced her in Anne’s affections.

As well as her infamous letter writing, Sarah was a compulsive and compelling writer of her own history: narrating the major events of life at Blenheim Palace and at court, often with herself centre-stage. It is through her writings and by casting a critical eye over images of the Duchess handed down through art, history and literature (most of which are extremely biased and sexist), Field has been able to write, what I feel, is a balanced biography, that brings Sarah Churchill’s own voice back to life, and fairly shows the light and dark sides of her character.

While I can’t say I came to ‘like’ Sarah after reading this – I do feel her treatment of Anne was pretty abominable – I did come to admire and have some sympathy for her. As she was time and again attacked for traits that would have been applauded had she been a man, whilst completely overlooking her virtues, such as how she was capable of inspiring intense love and loyalty, deeply committed to her principles and to living what she believed to be a virtuous life, that included many kindnesses to those less fortunate than herself.

I must admit I found the swathes of political tracts a little like wading through treacle sometimes. However please don’t mistake this for a criticism of the biography or author, as I feel that with Sarah’s strongly held Whig sympathies and her passionate commitment to reform and religious freedom, you couldn’t have written this without her politics! Instead, for my personal taste, I found myself reading through more swiftly the sections on her ‘friendship’ with Anne; her life-long love story with her husband, John Churchill; and her relationships with her daughters, friends, enemies, servants and tenants.

Overall I thought The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough was a fascinating history, and while it took me a long time to read it, I really enjoyed finding out more of the real history behind this controversial character. And I believe Field has created a fair and comprehensive portrait of a woman, who cared intensely about how we would remember her.

I absolutely loved the movie based on this book starring Olivia Coleman, and it was great to be able to learn more about this absolutely fascinating story and the relationships in that court.

An excellent and very personal account of a woman who was for a period the richest and most powerful woman in Europe.

Field is thoughtful in her approach to Sarah Churchill without being scholarly and makes good use of the personal letters between her and Queen Anne: but I'd have to say that as a narrative this feels a bit chaotic and muddled. It can't quite decide whether it wants to be a biography of a strong woman, or a history of the period from the restoration of Charles II to the death of Anne, the last of the Stuarts. I know it's hard to untangle the two, but the focus of the text constantly wavers. One minute we're exploring complicated female lives and relationships, then we're in the midst of the Dutch Wars, the repeal of the Edict of Nantes, and various other wars conducted by Sarah's husband, the Duke of Marlborough. It's difficult, but the art of the biographer involves sketching in the relevant historical and political backgrounds without losing focus, and that doesn't quite happen here.

I'd have liked to have seen more discussion about the complicated friendship between Sarah and Anne - Field raises important points about how we read the boundaries between love and friendship in other historical periods, and also questions (rightly) modern categories of sexuality and how they might work historically - but these discussions feel truncated and don't really feed through the book: they're spotty and local only.

Churchill is a fascinating subject as is Anne, but I'm not sure I really got to grips with them here - this book certainly whetted my appetite though to learn more.

An interesting biography of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, which follows from her birth to her death. I'm always interested in the stories of people adjacent to royalty, so decided to read this without knowing anything about Sarah or Anne, the princess and later queen to whom she was so thoroughly attached. This may have been a mistake, since this felt like a book meant as an in-depth study for those who already knew the bones of the story, rather than a 'popular' history book for the casual reader.

I found that the first few chapters relied on a knowledge of the period that I did not have - the author assumes that the reader will know who several figures are, which was certainly not the case for me (even with an A-level in History). I knew nothing about this period at all, and could have certainly used a better overview of the situation at the beginning of the book. However, after googling the central people involved in Sarah's story, I was very interested in the excerpts from her letters and the picture that they built of her life. The narrative style being interspersed with quotes from letters works well for most of the book, but I did find it repetitive at times, and ended up skimming the last chapter (essentially a list of other people who have written about Sarah).

Pretty interesting, but not the most compelling history I've ever read.