At the risk of admitting that I am the sort of person who is pleasantly surprised to discover water is wet despite going for a swim once every week or so, it is gratifying to discover, once more, how unromantic a romantic historical novel can be. Great Maria, of all of Cecelia Hollands' novels I've read this far, is certainly the most romantic of her books. Love and the relationship between a man and a woman plays a central role, and it's the first of her books to feature a female protagonist. It is also, incidentally, twice as long as everything else I've read by her.

Being a Holland novel, no-one gets off lightly. Maria's life is charted from her prepubescent innocence to her wily middle age. The daughter of a powerful Norman robber-knight in southern Italy in the early 11th century, she is married off to one of his more ambitious men, Richard (despite her own preference for Richard's younger brother, Roger.) When her father decides that Richard is getting a bit too big for his britches, his plan to kill him fails and Richard takes ownership of his castle and lands. Richard's ambitions are to rise above the role of thief, and he sets out to carve out his own place in the world.

Maria never questions her subservient role in this world. She doesn't long to be a knight or agitate for voting rights or rail against the closed medieval mind. Hers is a medieval mind. When her husband beats her, she doesn't like it or even love him for it, but she has to accept there's nothing she can do about it and her fate is tied to his. Gradually she comes into her own, prescribed, female role, often bringing Richard's violent wrath down on herself, sometimes because she is foolish, sometimes because she is clever, always because she is headstrong. Risking his temper is a thing she is prepared to do to get her way. Nonetheless, he grows to rely on her and her attraction to him is as much physical as it is anything else.

She has babies, not all of whom survive, and they grow, and Richard extends his conquests and his power, and there is danger and intrigues and violence and tempestuous scenes and passionate... stuff and eavesdropping and betrayals, all told in Hollands crisp, plain, practical style that makes no apologies for characters that are compelling and multi-faceted and sympathetic even with their monstrous faults, such as domestic abuse and murder.