“The fog was still thick, cocooning Versailles, a place that had no need of anywhere else.’ And it’s this sense of the claustrophobia of privilege that pervades Kate Brown’s vivid imagining of the court of Louis XV as seen through the eyes of his frustrated teenage daughter Adélaïde.

Adélaïde, like everyone else – including the King – who lives and parades within the palace, is bound by the restrictive etiquette of courtly life, where everyone is trapped by convention and watched over by everyone else. Yet Brown is keen to draw attention to the additional layers of restriction felt by its women.

From Adélaïde’s perspective we view the expectations placed on women’s bodies, the dangers of pregnancy, the demand for an heir, the duties and politics involved of being the King’s mistress and the necessary compliance of the queen. And we feel Adélaïde’s desire to rebel against the constant policing of female bodies via their activities and clothing.

But this is a confusing time for our heroine who is waking up to inequalities between the sexes, while becoming aware of her own sexuality, and the appeal of one man in particular. Their interactions, including a memorable sword-fighting scene (not a euphemism!) became some of my favourite scenes from the novel.

The narrative switches between Adélaïde’s first person point of view and occasional, shorter third person sections, which leap forward to when she, and the palace, are witness to the opening salvos of the French Revolution. In one of these latter-day sections, we learn a key piece of information about her character which becomes a lens through which we view the young Adélaïde. We know more about the direction her life is heading than she does and, like her, we too experience the frustrations of her position!

Ultimately The Women of Versailles is good old-fashioned story-telling wrapped around a lucid insight into the external restrictions imposed on us by society, and the restrictions we impose on ourselves.