Queen Hereafter Offers a Fierce Origin Story for One of Shakespeare’s Most Famous Women

Lady Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare’s most iconic characters. The wife of the titular character in Macbeth, she is one of the Bard’s most impactful and vividly rendered women, a figure who is allowed agency, ambition, and depth of her own. Yet, although the play hints that Lady Macbeth has a much more complex and tragic history than what we see on stage, most of our modern-day pop culture still tends to focus primarily on her worst deeds, content to simply label her a villain and blame her for her husband’s choices rather than truly wrestle with her story’s larger questions about gender and power. 

\This is why Isabelle Schuler’s Queen Hereafter feels like such a breath of fresh air. The novel, which deftly mixes Shakespearean fiction with the scant bits of historical fact we know about the real-life figures who inspired the play, unabashedly re-centers Lady Macbeth at the center of her own story, reframing a long-accepted narrative by giving this oft-vilified woman a chance to speak for herself.  To be clear, Schuler’s version of Lady Macbeth—here reimagined as a Picti princess known as Gruoch—remains as dark and complicated as the one most readers will likely already be familiar with. But the inventive ways in which her story is framed not only give her a welcome sense of depth and self-determination, but allow her to wholeheartedly embrace the same traits—ambition, ruthlessness, and single-minded focus—that she’s long been judged a monster for possessing. 

Set in early 11th century Alba (the Gaelic name for Scotland), the novel follows Gruoch, who will one day become known to the world as Lady Macbeth. Descended from druids and kings, she has grown up with her pagan Picti grandmother’s prophecies ringing in her ears: That she would be Queen of Alba, that she would be greater than any that had come before her in her family, that she would one day be immortalized the world over. When she is betrothed to Duncan, the heir to the throne, it seems as though her grandmother’s promises are about to come true, though her rise to greatness will require her to leave her family, the land she has made her home, and her childhood friend Macbethad, who has both taught her to protect herself with a dagger and never questioned the depth of her ambitions. 

But when she arrives in Scone, Gruoch is unprepared for the hostility and constant scheming at Duncan’s court, where other young women regularly throw themselves in the heir-elect’s path in the hopes of catching his eye and his disdainful mother Bethoc resents her presence. Even her burgeoning friendship with Ardith—a devout pagan who’s pretending to be a convert to the Christian faith to secure her own future as an abbess—-is full of more complicated layers and slippery promises than she’s entirely comfortable with. 

When a dramatic turn of events forces Gruoch to flee before her marriage can take place, she returns north, only to find herself lost and almost entirely alone, on a path that no longer leads to a crown and married to a man she doesn’t particularly like or respect. The novel is particularly forthright about the precarious nature of life among medieval Scotland’s ruling families, and Gruoch must constantly to keep herself safe in a world that values her for her bloodline more than her intelligence or capability to lead. Yet, Gruoch holds fast to her ambition and is more than capable of doing whatever it takes to get ahead, whether that means lying, betraying those around her, or even committing violence against those she sees as a threat. 

Queen Hereafter isn’t precisely a feminist novel, at least not in the way we necessarily tend to understand it. Gruoch’s beliefs about her own abilities and worth are almost entirely self-interested and tied to her own sense of destiny rather than her gender. The story’s secondary female characters—the mysterious Ardith, Gruoch’s handmaid Sinna, and Macbethad’s mother Donalda—aren’t given a tremendous amount of depth or interiority, even when their actions hint that these women are all capable of much more than they initially seem. Yet, the book deftly captures Gruoch’s lifelong struggle to push back against the constraints of a society that sees strong-willed women as something to be subjugated rather than celebrated. 

Her relationship with Macbethad, however, is presented as one not just of equals but partners, and the story is careful to illustrate the ways the future King of Scotland not only accepts but admires the very traits the world around her despise—her ambition, her cunning, and her ruthlessness. (I’ve always been an unrepentant shipper of the Macbeths, so it’s honestly a lot of fun to watch their offbeat and admittedly kind of dark bond form.) 

Queen Hereafter technically ends before Shakespeare’s Macbeth begins, but with just enough space between the two to offer a tantalizing space for readers to decide for themselves how the pair we meet here ultimately become the duo immortalized in the Bard’s famous play. But however you think the Macbeths navigate the loss and darkness looming ahead of them, it’s easy to believe that Schuler’s Gruoch would find the trade worth it in the end. After all, we’re still talking about her, aren’t we?

Queen Hereafter is available now. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyM