Twas the moment deep
When we are conscious of the secret dawn
Amid the darkness that we feel is green…

Thy face remembered is from other worlds,
It has been died for, though I know not when,
It has been sung of, though I know not where…

Anya Seton has written here a dual-time tale of a girl, Celia Bohun, living in 1550’s Tudor England, and her reincarnated counterpart, Celia Marsdon, living in 1968. The Tudor story is three quarters of the novel and the modern day story only one quarter, which suited me well, since I usually seem to have more interest in the earlier time frames when reading such novels. We are told at the outset, so no spoiler, that the original Celia was walled up alive in a castle called Ightham Mote, after becoming pregnant at the hand of a monk, and this tidbit keeps the reader plowing ahead, after all, anyone would want to know how and why such a thing should happen to a young girl.

Unfortunately, that tidbit might have been the only reason I kept reading. I was vaguely interested in the developing relationship between Celia and Brother Stephen and Seton draws an intriguing picture of life for Catholics in the chaos of changing loyalties during the reigns of Edward, then Mary, and finally Elizabeth. However, I failed completely at feeling any connection or even concern for the two main characters. Much of their story made no logical sense to me. Perhaps I have become too old for stories in which the physical attraction of a body consumes one’s soul. I wanted there to be something deeper underlying this attraction, but Seton never gave me that, so the unrelenting nature of Celia’s love seemed naive and false and contrived. I was put in mind of a stubborn child who simply wants the toy and is pitching a tantrum for it. She did not receive the kind of encouragement that I would have thought necessary in order to take some of the ridiculous choices that she took.

I have read Seton before and enjoyed her writing, so this one was a disappointment for me. I have given it a 3✯ rating because I did “like” it, I just didn’t love it or think it would be very memorable. I suspect that if you asked me six months from now I would be hard pressed to tell you a single detail except the obvious one that comes early on and kept me reading.

( )

I enjoyed the vast majority of this novel; an historical romance set in Tudor England that is about 90% of the book. The front and end pieces with the modern characters and reincarnation seemed superfluous. Whatever was driving all of that didn't interest me. However, the Tudor romance was overall well done and an enjoyable, if overlong read. She did a good job of blending in history without making it too awkward and the place and characters felt very real. I'm not looking forward to dipping back into some Anya Seton.

Having picked Green Darkness up from the local library bookstore sale for only a quarter, I truly had no idea what I was getting myself into. Historical fiction, in any form, is not a genre that I've spent much time with, and coupling that with paranormal romance? Well, we can safely say that I was in for a ride.

Green Darkness shares the harrowing tale of forbidden love in mid-1500s England between an unfortunate peasant girl and a Benedictine monk, betwixt the reigns of King Edward VI, Queen Mary I, and Queen Elizabeth - a time when Catholicism and Protestantism (depending on the ruler) were met with persecution. It doesn't begin in that era, however; rather, the story starts in the 1960s, when Celia and her newly wedded husband, Richard Marsdon, arrive at his family's ancestral estate in Sussex. A baffling illness befalls the Marsdons, leaving the unorthodox physician, Doctor Akananda, to unravel the mysterious past that haunts the pair from hundreds of years before.

The twisting tale that unravels of that love affair is only a small part of what I enjoyed about this book, as romance is not typically my cup of tea. What truly enticed me was [a:Anya Seton|18930|Anya Seton|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1224813438p2/18930.jpg]'s faithfulness not only to history, but to location, legend, and use of historical figures. Cowdray House and Ightham Mote are real places, and an unfounded rumor regarding the Mote suggests that a female skeleton was found within its walls - which Seton used as a basis for her story. Through Seton, I discovered an unknown love for Tudor England, and undoubtedly I will read more books set in that time period.

Despite my praise for the book, I was unable to give it a five star rating because of its conclusion: it was as if Seton ran out of fuel. The idea of reincarnation takes a more ridiculous turn when Doctor Akananda hints at more pasts that conveniently interlock the same people. As if that were not enough of an affront, the resolution itself fell flat. With the Marsdon family tragedy conveniently wrapped up, Celia and Stephen seem aloof and their interaction felt a bit too forced. It is for this reason that I gave the book four stars. ( )

Interesting ... kept my attention (to my surprise).

Reincarnation; working off karmic debts;
the historic portion was quite well done I think, and nicely incorporated the political changes & the catholic/protestant tensions ( )

Although this story is set in two different time periods, Tudor England and 1968 very little of the book takes part in 1968 which i liked as I tend to prefer the historical parts of these types of stories.

While I enjoyed this book and thought it was well written I'm only giving it 3 stars as I found the central character Celia to be a selfish bitch. She claims to love the priest but sees nothing wrong in wanting him to give up the church which he loves, or he could give up his chosen religion and instead of being a Catholic priest he could become a Lutheran one instead and then they could get married. She also doesn't see anything wrong in giving him a potion that she got from a witch, a potion that was supposed to be used on her husband so that they would be able to have sex and she would become pregnant. She never uses the potion on the husband and after he dies she uses it on the priest because she wants him but he keeps pushing her away. When she was given the potion the witch warned her that it would be dangerous to use it for anything other than its intended purpose, and of course when you ignore a warning from a witch there is a price to be paid.

Celia initially gets what she wants, she becomes pregnant with the priest's baby and he agrees to leave with her. However the mistress of the house finds out about them having sex and murders Celia and hides her body. The priest thinks Celia has ran away with somebody else and he commits suicide. ( )

Fun escapist historical fiction. ( )

Fun escapist historical fiction. ( )

New favorite book of all time. Even the second time. ( )

Reincarnation provides the path to time-travel in this classic gothic tale of historical romance. The new, happy marriage of Celia and Richard Marsdon seems to have fallen apart since they have returned to his ancestral home. Richard has withdrawn and Celia is feeling haunted and anxious. When she has a nervous collapse then becomes catatonic, Dr. Akananda makes a remarkable claim: Celia must resolve the trauma of a previous live or she will die. Celia's consciousness travels from 1968 to 1552, into the mind of Celia Bohun, a beautiful, orphan servant girl. In a time of religious strife, Celia Bohun fell in love with a monk, Brother Stephen Marsdon (Richard in a former life). When Brother Stephen forsakes his vows for love of Celia, he defies the laws of the church and the mores of Tudor society. Full of historical detail, intrigue, and danger, Seton draws the reader into the tale of Stephen and Celia's doomed love. The only question remaining is if Richard and Celia can set the wheel of fate and Karma back on track once the events of the past have been revealed.

I found this book sitting all by itself on a table at a library book sale. It was the last day of the sale and everything had been quite picked over except for this gem. Needless to say I grabbed it right away.

Thank goodness for the Mt. TBR Challenge which prompted me to read those books which have been on my shelves the longest. This being one.

The novel is divided into three parts and begins during what feels like the 1970's. Celia and Richard Marsdon are a wealthy young couple recently married and living in the Marsdon family home. One evening Celia falls into a trance-like state and we find out that she is revisiting her past life in the 1500's. Her past life involves a tragic love and ending which must be resolved in order for her present to be free.

I loved this middle section and thought it was really well done. The reign of Edward the VI and his subsequent death felt really well researched and that shows in the writing. Seton explores the idea of reincarnation and atonement in an interesting way that is believable and not gimmicky.

Another winner from Seton. ( )

Rating: 3 stars out of five, but only because I still love the memory

The Book Report: The book description says:

This unforgettable story of undying love combines mysticism, suspense, mystery, and romance into a web of good and evil that stretches from 16th-century England to the present day. Richard Marsdon marries a young American woman named Celia, brings her to live at his English estate, and all seems to be going well. But now Richard has become withdrawn, and Celia is constantly haunted by a vague dread. When she suffers a breakdown and wavers between life and death, a wise doctor realizes that only by forcing Celia to relive her past can he enable her to escape her illness. Celia travels back 400 years in time to her past life as a beautiful but doomed servant. Through her eyes, we see the England of the Tudors, torn by religious strife, and experience all the pageantry, lustiness, and cruelty of the age. As in other historical romance titles by this author, the past comes alive in this flamboyant classic novel.

My Review: My sister used to have a book store. She, our mother, and I all spent the summer of 1973, damn near 40 years ago now, reading this book. We'd been stealing it back and forth from each other until finally she gave Mama and me our own copies so she could read it in peace. We did a sort of group read on the book, and oh my heck how we liked it!

I was a teenager then. I wasn't an inexperienced reader, but I was completely suckered in by anything to do with reincarnation. Mama was just getting the Jeebus infection that ate her sense of humor, compassion, and decency...all oddly enough while sexually abusing her teenaged son, funny how often religion masks corruption...and my sister was in one of the periodic hellish patches that have punctuated her road through life.

We all resonated with the travails of the characters, trying to work out their manifold interconnections and karmic debts. The book's very Gothicness was deeply appealing to each of us for our own reasons, and gave us hours and hours of fun things to talk about. For that, a whole star in grateful memory.

Rereading this at fifty-two was probably a mistake. The writing is very much what one would expect of an historical novelist whose career began in the 1940s. She was renowned in the day for her meticulous research, and yet says in her Preface (p. vi of the 1973 Houghton Mifflin hardcover I got from the liberry), “Source books make for tedious listing, but for the Tudor period {of Green Darkness} I have tried to consult all the pertinent ones.” Imagine someone, even a novelist, trying to get away with that now! There would be calumnious mutterings and sulphrous aspersions cast on the character and the ability of such an author. As if it matters in a work of fiction.

The humid Gothic atmosphere of lust and love denied, the surrendered to, then disastrously brought to a close, was a little hard on my older self. I like romantic stories just fine, but the moralizing you can keep. And there is a deal of moralizing! Whee dawggie! The gay characters are ugly...as within, so without, and Seton clearly has the attitude of her day towards gay men...the lusty lower-class wenches get their bastards and get turned out, the Catholic Church and its hypocrisy suffer agonies at the hands of the vile Protestant politicians...Seton was raised a Theosophist...good people turn hard and cold when given property to protect...the Exotic Hindu Doctor who understands Modern Medicine but Knows How to Be In Touch With the Spirits, oof!...oh, the lot!

So not so much on the attitude. I get it, and in those days I absorbed it because it was the way my family thought, but how I wish I could go back to 1973 and smack this book out of my young hands! Along with Stranger in a Strange Land, its misogyny and homophobia leached right into my brain and lodged there. Never made me one whit less gay, just made me feel terrible about it, like the culture's messages continue to do to young and impressionable kids to this day.

But the fact that the lady wrote this, her next-to-last book, when she was nearing seventy and had only just been divorced from her husband of nigh on forty years, and was beginning her long decline into ill health, makes Green Darkness a poignant re-read for me. Her life was unraveling, and mine was too (what little there was of it at that point); I think both my mother and my sister felt the same way. I suspect some resonance of that bound all of us to this book and spoke to each of us about its unhappy people in unhappy lives. There is, in the best romantic tradition, a happy ending. But I for one have never believed it. ( )

This is my first book I have read by Anya Seton.
I began the book and got to Part 2 and decided it was not for me so decided to read the last chapter. I then thought it sounded interesting and read the whole book and the last chapter again. Actually, reading the last chapter first worked best for me.
The novel has the main characters, Sir Richard Marsdon of England and his American wife, Lady Celia Marsdon.
The periods of time are the 1960s and also the 16th century. Celia goes back into time; a book that somewhat deals with reincarnation. There is history, mystery, romance, hate and Tutor England.
It was not a page turner for me but got better about half-way through the book. I thought there were too many characters and too much happening.
It is a fairly well written book and interesting; the history is what I personally like.
Reading the book does make me want to do some research on some of the characters. It is a book that I could read a second time when I have time.
Leona ( )

Beautifully told tale of medieval love, honor, and duty and the ways in which we imprison ourselves. Storytelling at its best! ( )

The best book ever!!! ( )

This book started off very slow and confusing. Once the plot moved to Tudor England, things got better. The thing that always wins me over with Anya Seton is that she is very adept at bringing you into the world she is writing about. She describes things in a way that makes you smell, taste, and hear the world of the story's setting.

Overall this book had high points of interest and a few dull spots. If you have the patience to see it through, you will be rewarded. ( )

I read this when it was first published and was blown away. One of the few books that I was unable to finish without a lump in my throat and tears hindering me from reading the last pages. ( )

A quasi reincarnation/historical fiction written in the early 1970's that takes place in 1968 and then 400 years earlier. Centers around a particular Catholic family and dealing with the change of monarchs - and their religions - after Henry VIII's death, and a young servant girl who falls in love with her priest and the consequences that haunt them 400 years later. Not bad, but I've read better during this period.

http://ktleyed.blogspot.com/2010/02/green-darkness-by-anya-seton.html ( )

Highly unusual. The ending left me flabergasted. Extremely recommended. Loved how the story of an ancient monk and his true love gets tied into the 1960s. The best book I've read in a long time. I'll never forget it. When the title mentions darkness it is not kidding. ( )

A very good novel combining historical fiction with the supernatural, and a rather sinister undertone. Perhaps a little too long and the fact that every heterosexual Tudor male falls madly in love with Celia gets a little wearing, but a very satisfying read. ( )

The ratings don't go high enough here to rate this awesome novel. ( )

I read this book back in the seventies and was delighted to find it again. Seton is an amazing historian and is able to recount stories in great detail and from different angles. Reincarnation historical romances remind us that there is nothing new under the sun. There is heartbreak, betrayal, and just plain old bad timing in every age. In Green Darkness, religious intolerance was the catalyst for most political intrigues and both Protestant and Catholic used their "one true faith" to gain control and power over the masses. A person's religion saturated everything in their lives for good or ill.
The love story of Celia and Brother Stephen was an interesting way to show the contrast between the sacred and the secular. Like religion in that time, there was ultimately no way to bring the two together in any meaningful way and it ended up destroying them both. It was quite brilliantly done and has many valid lessons for our time. ( )

I was a bit skeptical in the bookstore when I first read the blurb on the back of this book, but I figured "what the hell" and bought it anyway.

I'm glad I did. This is a wonderful, dense book full of history and treachery. It is a book about reincarnation and making amends for past mistakes and lost chances.

I have a few bones of contention. One such bone is that I never was convinced that Stephen was truly in love with Celia, that perhaps he just grew tired of being pursued by the shameless little hussy. Celia was a willful, selfish young woman convinced that her beauty would get her exactly what she wanted. She used her wiles to entrap men and cast them aside because she could only focus on Stephen, a Benedictine monk who tried everything in his power to resist her. Celia came to a bad end, and a part of me felt that her ending may have been justified by the period of time's standards. She openly defied and turned her back on God be he Protestant or Catholic, and it can be perceived that through her sacrilege God turned his back on her as well.

Not the best reincarnation book I've ever read, but it was an unputdownable doozy.

Recommended. ( )

Green Darkness is an odd kind of book. In the preface, Seton informs the reader that she has written a book about reincarnation. She apparently was raised by two believers in the doctrine and set out to incorporate this theme in her book. This was, in my opinion, a mistake. Fortunately for you, dear readers, if you skip Parts 1 and 3 (set in the early 1970’s) the 475 pages of story that is left turns out to be pretty good Tudor-era historical fiction. (I encourage you to ignore the bits of reincarnation piffle that leak through on occasion – it will take nothing away from your enjoyment of the story.) The story focuses on Celia deBohun, a teenaged girl from the wrong side of the blanket and her pursuit of the Roman Catholic monk, Stephen Marsdon. Celia’s aunt, Lady Ursula Southwell, a dependent of the RC noble, Sir Anthony Browne of Cowdray Castle, takes Celia in and determines to raise her, as best she is able, as a lady. Ursula hopes that one day she might make a good match for Celia – the best that can be achieved considering how very poor Urusula is and Celia’s bastard state. She even makes an arrangement with the house priest – Stephen – to educate the girl as much as can be done and to instruct her in the Catholic religion as Celia knows virtually nothing about religion of any kind. Big mistake.

Swirling around the characters is the extremely unstable political condition of England at the time. No one – Protestant or Roman Catholic – has an easy time of things. Everyone is forced into a balancing act, depending upon which one of the three Tudor siblings – Edward, Mary or Elizabeth - is in control at any particular time. Those members of the nobility who cannot bring themselves to switch from one religion to another have a harder time of it than the others. The ordinary people are confused by the constant shifting back and forth in religion and many end up not knowing what to think, including Celia, who having come late to religion, eventually decides she needs no religion at all and will, instead, just follow the form of whatever seems expedient at the time. She has a bigger fish to land. With the single-mindedness of the young, she pursues Stephen relentlessly. Stephen, it must be said, does not really do all he should to protect himself from her, but after several years of trying to shake Celia off, he probably just got tired. He is, underneath it all, a man and she is very persistent.

Seton provides Part 2 with a dark ending – a really dreadful one – and she should have left it there, but having afflicted us with Part 1 she really had to wind up that part of the story. I only read Part 3, because I’d read Part 1. It wasn’t good. If and when I read this book again I’ll go straight to Part 2. It was worth the read – the other parts were not.
Three and half stars for Part 2
One and half stars for Parts 1 & 3. ( )

Fantastic Historical fiction. Intrigue, Characters, What a Twist! ( )

Personally I didn't like this book nearly as much as the previous Seton books I've read (Katherine and Winthrop Woman).
This story starts out in modern 20th century -- turns out the characters are reincarnations of characters in early Tudor England. A monk has an affair with a servant girl. ( )