Guest Post: Shades of Yellow by Wendy J. Dunn
- Archaeolibrarian
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Book details:
Name: Wendy J. Dunn
Book Title: Shades of Yellow
Series: n/a
Publication Date: September 7th, 2025
Publisher: Other Terrain Press
Pages: 350
Genre: Women’s Fiction / Literary Fiction / Dual-Timeline
Any Triggers: Adult themes and with a few well-deserved F words included.
@cathie.dunn1 @thecoffeepotbookclub
@wendyjdunnauthor @thecoffeepotbookclub
During her battle with illness, Lucy Ellis found solace in writing a novel about the mysterious death of Amy Robsart, the first wife of Robert Dudley, the man who came close to marrying Elizabeth I. As Lucy delves into Amy's story, she also navigates the aftermath of her own experience that brought her close to death and the collapse of her marriage.
After taking leave from her teaching job to complete her novel, Lucy falls ill again. Fearing she will die before she finishes her book, she flees to England to solve the mystery of Amy Robsart's death.
Can she find the strength to confront her past, forgive the man who broke her heart, and take control of her own destiny?
Who better to write about a betrayed woman than a woman betrayed?
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Did I discover any surprising or little-known facts during my research that made it into Shades of Yellow?
Little-known facts…How I wish I had found lots of little-known facts about Amy Robsart. Instead, it surprised me to discover how little we really know about Amy Robsart. I’m uncertain why it surprised me. I know the Tudor period well enough to know that what we know about the lives of far too many Tudor women comes from researching the men who they were connected to.
Virginia Woolf describes this situation perfectly:
Women stories are be found in the lives of the obscure — In those almost unlit corridors of history where the figures of generations of women are so dimly, so fitfully perceived. For very little Is known about women. The history of England Is the history of the male line, not of the female (2009 p. 28).
While I agree with William Styron that writers of historical fiction are better off when history only leaves short rations because these short rations create gaps for us to fill through our imagination, I still found it sad that what we know of Amy boils down to these ‘short rations’.Amy had a life, even if only a brief one of twenty-eight years, but the important things we know about that life is that she came from a wealthy family, she married Robert Dudley, and that the how and why she died remains a mystery. While we are fortunate to possess a few letters that provide echoes of her Norfolk birth and upbringing, her voice is mostly silent.
Her silent voice is why I chose to write her imagined voice in Shades of Yellow in first person. It needed to be in first person because the story I crafted about Amy Robsart is such a personal one. History suggests she had many reasons to be unhappy as Robert’s wife. She came to London as a girl of eighteen to take her place in a powerful family. She had very few connections in London, so she must have felt very alone.
Knowing Robert’s later life, the seeds of ambition were likely already planted in his persona when they married. While Amy was her father’s heiress, Robert's desire to marry her suggests these seeds were yet dormant, but the years of tragedy after tragedy for the Dudley family woke these seeds. By 1558 when Elizabeth became queen, there was little space for Amy in his life. By then, Robert Dudley’s gaze and interest had turned to Elizabeth I. Amy and Robert’s childlessness likely sealed the end of whatever love he had for her.
Amy spent little time with Robert in the final years of her life. She was ill and expected to die during these years – well, at least that is what most people believed. Whatever was true about her situation, Amy would have known her husband kept his distance from her.
How lonely and abandoned Amy must have felt in those years. How sad that what we remember of her today is her death.
I believe she deserves more than that.
Sources:
Styron, W. 2010, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Kindle edition: Open Road.
Woolf, V. 2009, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5: 1929 to 1932, Chatto & Windus, New York
WENDY J. DUNN is a multi-award-winning Australian writer fascinated by Tudor history – so much so she was not surprised to discover a family connection to the Tudors, not long after the publication of Dear Heart, How Like You This, her first Anne Boleyn novel, which narrated the Anne Boleyn story through the eyes of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder.
Her family tree reveals the intriguing fact that one of her ancestral families – possibly over three generations – had purchased land from both the Boleyn and Wyatt families to build up their holdings. It seems very likely Wendy’s ancestors knew the Wyatts and Boleyns personally.
Wendy gained her PhD in 2014 and tutors in writing at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. She loves walking in the footsteps of the historical people she gives voice to in her books.
Author Links:
Website: http://www.wendyjdunn.com/
Newsletter: https://wendyjdunn.substack.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wendyjdunnauthor/
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Wendy-J.-Dunn/author/B004FRTZFA
Tour hosted by: The Coffee Pot Book Club
Thank you so much for hosting Wendy J. Dunn today, with such an interesting article linked to her new novel, Shades of Yellow.
Take care,
Cathie xx
The Coffee Pot Book Club