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A Novel
by Vanora BennettThis article relates to Portrait of an Unknown Woman
Vanora Bennett became a
journalist by accident; having
learned Russian and been hired
out of university by Reuters she
was catapulted into the
adrenaline charged realm of
conflict reporting. She has
reported from Paris, Cambodia,
Indonesia and Africa where she
commuted between Angola and
Mozambique writing about death,
destruction, diamonds and
disease; after which she took a
posting in Chechnya, three
months after it gained
independence from the Soviet
Union.
In 1998 she published
Crying Wolf: The Return of War to
Chechnya; a second, more
light-hearted book followed
about post-Soviet Russia's
illegal caviar trade titled
The Taste of Dreams: An
Obsession with Russia and Caviar
(2003).
She now lives in North
London with her husband and two
small sons from where she writes
a regular column for the London
Times. Portrait of an Unknown
Woman (published in the UK
in 2006) is her first novel.
Her second novel,
Figures in Silk (sent in
15th century London about the
silk trade and Richard III),
published in the UK in May 2008.
She was inspired to write
Portrait of an Unknown Woman
after viewing a Holbein
exhibition at the National
Portrait Gallery some years ago.
At the time she was living in
Boris Yeltsin's New Russia, and
was struck with how much the
faces of the new Tudor
aristocracy* resembled the
tough, aggressive, on-the-make
faces of the successful new
capitalists she saw in Moscow
every day.
*Many of Henry VIII's leading advisers, including the four Thomases (More, Cranmer, Cromwell and Wolsey), were the sons or grandsons of tradesmen, who had improved their positions during the power vacuum following the War of the Roses (a war between two sides of the Plantagenet family over which side of their extended family had the right to the throne of England); by the end of the war many of the English nobility had been killed and Henry VII (with connections to the House of Lancaster but little claim to the throne) put an end to the Plantagenet in-fighting by taking the throne and marrying a princess from the House of York; his second son became Henry VIII.
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This "beyond the book article" relates to Portrait of an Unknown Woman. It originally ran in May 2007 and has been updated for the April 2008 paperback edition. Go to magazine.
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