Reid presents the tale of Macbeth from a feminist viewpoint, making certain changes from Shakespeare’s plot to suit her purposes. Lady Macbeth, formerly Lady Roscille, daughter of the Duke of Breizh, the French region of Brittany, is offered by her father as a bride as part of a negotiated peace. Roscille is made to feel peculiar all her life by her father, a beauty, but born with silvery white hair and pale skin, with deep, dark eyes she keeps veiled, as it is thought that her gaze drives men to madness. She arrives at Scotland, to Glammis, the castle of Macbeth, Thane of Glammis. She is loath to share the matrimonial bed with the coarse, barbaric giant of a man, whom she learns is terribly ambitious to become King of Scotland, and willing to do anything to make this so. Macbeth plans to use his wife as a weapon, part of his arsenal for his ambitions.

Shakespeare’s play has Lady Macbeth seem more ambitious and cold-blooded, as she spurs on Macbeth to kill King Duncan, and go to war to acquire and keep the crown. Reid’s Lady Macbeth is a woman who fulfills men’s desires and assumptions about her, leveraging any power she can to survive in this dangerous court, where women are only vessels for men’s pleasure and producing male heirs, easily killed when their usefulness and beauty are gone. This Roscille has been led to believe that she is a witch, selfish, manipulative, and evil. This justifies any ill treatment of her. It is not until she meets and gets to know King Duncan’s eldest son, Lisander, a man carrying the burden of a strange curse, that she learns that she need not be what her father and husband have led her to believe of herself, that in fact she can use her strengths to be her own powerful self.

I wanted to read this book since I thought it would be more faithful to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but from Lady Macbeth’s point of view. This is not what Reid presents— it is a different story, not so much of political ambition and its consequences, but rather of power between men and women in a patriarchy, and how women must seek to empower themselves, finding men who are equals as partners. It was an interesting book nonetheless, although I do not consider myself feminist, but a traditionalist.