Saint Joan of Arc

Saint Joan of Arc by Vita Sackville-West

Vita Sackville-West (March 9, 1892 – June 2, 1962) was a successful novelist, poet, and journalist, who is most remembered now for her close friendship and relationship with Virginia Wolff. She was the inspiration for Wolff's androgynous Orlando. She published this book 15 years after Joan of Arc was declared a saint in the Catholic Church. So it is probably the first major biography of Joan published after her sainthood. In her Foreword she says "that Joan of Arc presented fundamental problem of the deepest importance" and whose "strange career... remains a story whose conclusion is as yet unfound."
What the author attempts to do is to gather all the first hand accounts, and to arrange Joan's story in roughly chronological order. When contemporary narratives differ on a point, she speculates as to what might be the truth. What I found most difficult in reading the book is that she quotes many of the sources in the original French, assuming her readers have a more than passing knowledge of the language. She also relates the story of Joan's guiding voices in a straightforward manner, not giving them a Divine or medical explanation.
I found the author related Joan's life in a sympathetic way that a female author could better provide than some of the male efforts to tell her story.