Lady Sybil's Choice

Jerusalem in the 1180s, seen through the journal of a young girl who has followed her brother Guy to the East: the leper king in his shut chambers, and the Lady Sybil, the king's widowed sister and heiress, who takes Guy for her husband and is later made to choose between him and her crown. Emily Sarah Holt wrote thirty historical novels for Protestant readers and researched each one from chronicles. The doctrine is unmistakable; the detail of a twelfth-century household is unusually good. Fifty-nine plates after painters including Frederic Leighton and Frank Bernard Dicksee follow the crusader theme through castles, quests, and the fatal pull between love and a crown.