Examining visual, musical and literary works from the late Tudor period to the First World War, Mary Queen of Scots traces a nation's long romance with the queen it once rejected.

Considering both mainstream works (from Edmund Spenser to Sir Walter Scott) and

the attachments to Mary that have been formed and sustained by certain subaltern groups, particularly women, Jayne Lewis separates Mary's life from the myth that formed about her and shows how her prevailing image as a sexualized mother has made her a complicated object of political and

personal desire. Lewis demonstrates how this desire emerged at a formative moment in the history of modern Britain, and, over time, subliminally shaped that very history.