Mr. Collis’s lovely, exciting, vivid, romantic, and extremely witty story…is a tale of pure enchantment throughout, of the darkest possible deeds in the brightest possible sunlight, of palanquins, royal barges and State Umbrellas, of dancing girls and jugglers, of poisonings, burnings, and executions at the feet and trunks of trained elephants, of tortuous intrigues and calm metaphysical discussions.

James Agate, Daily Express

She Was a Queen

Fiction by Maurice Collis

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.”

Paperback(published Jun, 01 1991)

ISBN
9780811211697
Price US
12.95
Portrait of Maurice Collis

Maurice Collis

20th century Irish novelist and historical writer

Mr. Collis’s lovely, exciting, vivid, romantic, and extremely witty story…is a tale of pure enchantment throughout, of the darkest possible deeds in the brightest possible sunlight, of palanquins, royal barges and State Umbrellas, of dancing girls and jugglers, of poisonings, burnings, and executions at the feet and trunks of trained elephants, of tortuous intrigues and calm metaphysical discussions.

James Agate, Daily Express