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Queen Victoria: From Her Birth to the Death of the Prince Consort
Queen Victoria From Her Birth to the Death of the Prince Consort Author:WOODHAM-SMITH, CECIL A great biography--a great history--Cecil Woodham-Smith's magnificent life of Victoria is the largest, most important work we have yet had from the author of The Reason Why, Florence Nightingale, and The Great Hunger. Its essential achievement is to give us, amply and convincingly, both Victoria herself--the complexities of her emotional life, t... more »he nuances of her temperament, her directness and strength, her private and her ceremonial presence--and the central experience of the England that affected and changed her, and which she affected and changed. It places Victoria in full historic context, making understandable--and vivid--the great political events and figures and the social essences of the era we call Victorian. And among its singular fascinations, it reveals Victoria against the astonishing background of conflicts, intrigues, and affections within the royal family itself. For Cecil Woodham-Smith has made unique use of the Royal Family Archives at Windsor, to which she was given access--the private family papers, rich in human minutiae and historic detail, of the British monarchy from the days of the Hanoverian Georges, the Regency, and the Royal Dukes, who were Victoria's uncles, through the Queen's own reign.
Here, then, is Victoria--the girl and the woman, the daughter and the mother, the wife and the queen--from her birth low in the Royal Succession to her coronation, to her bereavement at the death of the Prince Consort. And here is her England. It is the triumph of Cecil Woodham-Smith's extraordinary book that the complex inward events from which personality flows, and the myriad circumstances that are the stuff of history, are here brilliantly merged to give us whole a life, a country, and a time.« less