Beware, Princess Elizabeth

Beware, Princess Elizabeth is a historical novel for younger readers by the American writer Carolyn Meyer, published in 2001. It deals with the teenage years of Elizabeth I.

Elizabeth is the daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, and unlike her older half-sister Mary she has no memory of a time when she was the favourite at court. When her father dies, she is first overshadowed by her brother, the boy king Edward, and then imprisoned during the troubled reign of Mary.

For much of her young adulthood she is the forgotten, ill-favoured bastard daughter of the king and of the woman he had executed, and the novel follows her through the religious reforms of the period, the paranoia of her half-sister and the collapse of her hopes of love.

What the book sets out to show is the stretch of years that made Elizabeth into the ruler she later became, and it stays close to her own point of view while the politics of the Tudor court happen around her.