The White Queen

The White Queen is a historical novel by the English writer Philippa Gregory, published in 2009. It is the first book of her Cousins' War series, which is set during the Wars of the Roses.

The novel follows Elizabeth Woodville from her widowhood to her marriage to Edward IV and the years of political struggle that followed. Elizabeth goes to the king to petition for the land her husband left to her sons, and their private marriage offends the Earl of Warwick and the noblemen who had plans of their own for the royal match. Gregory tells the story from Elizabeth's point of view and keeps her family's ambitions, and her mother's reputation for witchcraft, inside the same account as the battles for the throne.

Gregory went on to write a sequence of novels covering the same period from the perspective of different women, among them The Red Queen and The Kingmaker's Daughter, and three of them were adapted for television in 2013. Her narration keeps to Elizabeth's own view of events even where the surviving record is thin.