Helen Castor of the Observer reviewed Queen Emma. An excerpt:
Harriet O'Brien's story is a dramatic one, and her Queen Emma a commanding, shrewd and manipulative figure.... In keeping with such sparing evidence, this is a lean and muscular narrative, often elegantly so. Moments of vivid immediacy are provided by a series of imagined vignettes, one at the beginning of each chapter. The repetition of form risks giving the book a static feel, but some of these tableaux - such as the blinding and murder of Emma's son Alfred - are genuinely powerful.
O'Brien is good at conveying the dangerous complexities of an inconsistently Christianised world where both marriage and legitimacy were negotiable constructs, and where primogeniture was not yet firmly established - circumstances that could make succession within a single dynasty a matter of bloody conflict, even without taking the ambitions of the Viking marauders into account. She gives a potent reminder of how pivotal a role women could play even in such an ostensibly macho society - and, despite the Victorian teleology of Our Island Story, of how contingent an entity England really is.
