Christina Hardyment reviewed Queen Emma in The Independent. An excerpt
Emma is not one of our best known queens but she richly deserves this illuminating biography. She married two English kings (Aethelred the Unready and Cnut), saw two of her sons (Harthacnut and Edward the Confessor) ... win the English throne, made several comebacks from disgrace and emerged as the only pre-Norman Conquest royal to have her bloodline continue after 1066.
Explaining how she achieved all this is no easy task, given the paucity and unreliability of contemporary records, the genealogical complexities of marriages and concubinages between Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Danes and Norwegians, and the constant ebb and flow of Norse invaders into England, punctuated by truce-making, truce-breaking and vengeful massacres. But Harriet O'Brien succeeds both in mapping the muddled decades between 1000 and 1066, and in constructing a plausible picture of Emma - or Aelfgifu, as her English subjects preferred to call her.
... O'Brien conveys the striking contemporary contrasts between extreme brutality and intense religiosity: lewd riddles and the noble nudity of Lady Godgifu (Godiva to you), stargazing and saint worship.
