Child of the Morning

Child of the Morning is a historical novel by the Canadian writer Pauline Gedge, published in 1977 and her first book.

Its subject is Hatshepsut, the daughter of a pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty, who came to power in a country with no tradition of a woman ruling it. Gedge follows her from a childhood in which she is raised to expect authority, through her marriage to her half-brother and the years in which she governs, to the opposition she meets from priests, officials and members of her own family who want the succession to go to a man. The novel is written from her point of view, which means that the campaigns, the building works and the political manoeuvres of the reign are all seen from the position of a ruler who has to keep proving that she is entitled to be where she is.

Gedge went on to write many novels set in ancient Egypt, and this first one established her as a writer of historical fiction about the Nile.