This re-telling of Jane Shore's story dates from the 1950s, and opens with Jane as she performs her "walk of shame" in her kirtle through the streets with a taper in her hand, and attracting a lot of male attention along the way. Following her penance, Jane is confined to Ludgate Prison where she reflects on her life and takes us back to where it all began.

Lindsay's novel contains much detail, focuses more on her relationships, is slightly dated by today's standards, though is still quite a readable tome on a woman at the periphery of the Wars of the Roses.

This is the second novel I’ve read recently about Jane Shore, the mistress of King Edward IV. The other was Mary Bennett’s Jane Shore, which I found quite disappointing. Having read two of Philip Lindsay’s other historical fiction novels, I was interested to see how he would tell the story of Jane’s life.

Set during the Wars of the Roses, the story is narrated by Jane herself, beginning as she is forced to walk through the streets of London dressed in her kirtle as public penance for her part in the conspiracy between Will Hastings and the Woodvilles. Jane then looks back on her life, starting with her unhappy marriage to the mercer William Shore and then taking us through her romances with Edward IV, Hastings and the Earl of Dorset. Lindsay ignores other possible facets of Jane’s character to focus almost exclusively on her relationships with the other men in her life. I appreciate that Jane was a royal mistress, after all, and not famous for much else, but I still felt that this book needed something more.

However, this book is completely different from Bennett’s! Lindsay’s Jane is a much more forceful personality who decides what she wants out of life and then goes and gets it. I expect the fact that this novel was published much more recently – in the 1950s – will have something to do with that. But despite Jane making a point of telling us that she expects no rewards or favours from the king in return for becoming his mistress and that she always does her best to help the poor and needy, I didn’t think she was a particularly likeable or sympathetic character. She uses her beauty to get her own way or to manipulate the men around her and I found her quite a shallow, controlling person.

Things do become more interesting and more compelling in the final third of the novel, when Edward’s death throws the court and the country into disarray once more after several years of relative stability. However, this is very much Jane’s story, so politics are pushed into the background apart from when they touch directly on Jane’s life. Still, I thought The Merry Mistress was a much better novel than Mary Bennett’s Jane Shore.