I've read several of Alison Weir's history books and, although I often disagree with her portrayal of events and people, I have generally found them to be well written and quite enjoyable. I was less impressed with her skill as a novelist after reading The Lady Elizabeth. Weir's fictionalized characters just didn't quite ring true, and even given the difference between today's speech and that of the 16th-century speech, the dialogue didn't feel natural. I found the whole episode of Elizabeth and the Admiral (which takes up a significant chunk of the book) tedious. Weir herself says in her author's note that she doesn't believe the controversial event at the heart of that narrative actually took place. She sees her novel as an opportunity to explore the "what if?" of the situation, but for me this just didn't work, and I find it odd that a historical novelist would choose to include a sequence of events that she admits she herself doesn't buy into.

The book improved in its second half, with the dialogue ringing slightly more true as Elizabeth got older and wiser, but throughout the book, the biggest problem was that Weir has failed to master one of the key tenets of fiction writing: "Show, don't tell." She constantly tells us - or has characters themselves tell us - how they feel and why they are doing things. This made the book a lot less interesting than it could have been, and I almost gave up partway through. I decided to stick it out and did enjoy it more once we got away from the exploration of Elizabeth's adolescent sexual awakening with the Admiral and into Mary Tudor's reign. However, I won't be reading any more of Weir's fiction. Her Elizabeth just wasn't believable enough.

For me, the gold standard of historical novels about Elizabeth remains Susan Kay's Legacy which is simply superb. I can't recommend it highly enough.