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Summary
Summary
A twenty-first-century perspective on a giant of English history, Queen Victoria, and her marriage to German Prince Albert--timed to benefit from the release of the upcoming film The Young Victoria
Known as one of history's most powerful and happily married couples, Victoria and Albert together ruled the British Empire for twenty years at the peak of its strength in mid-nineteenth century. The standard account of their union is that young Victoria, married at nineteen, was only too happy to hand over the reins of power to her husband, willingly taking a back seat to bear and raise their nine children.
A well-known chronicler of the lives of achieving women, author Gillian Gill rejects this outdated interpretation, retelling the couple's story from a fresh, modern perspective. Victoria hated pregnancy, and as much as she loved Albert, she never let him impinge on her power. Gill makes the case that Albert's early death was the reason for the marriage's great success, leaving his widow another forty years on the throne to rule as sole monarch.
Gill's last book, Nightingales, about the life and times of Florence Nightingale, was called vivid and completely readable by The New York Times Book Review. She brings the same engaging storytelling to this vibrant, important new biography.
Author Notes
Gillian Gill, who holds a PhD in modern French literature from Cambridge University, has taught at Northeastern, Wellesley, Yale, and Harvard. She is the author of Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale , Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries , and Mary Baker Eddy . She lives in suburban Boston.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
According to Gill (Nightingales), the age that has been labeled Victorian was, in its origins, Albertian. Prince Albert was the chaste scion of a family of ambitious, debt-ridden, sexually corrupt misogynists, and his holy war of moral strictness made him appear straitlaced, judgmental and sanctimonious. In marrying Victoria, says Gill, Albert planned to take the reins of British power, though parliamentary rules didn't allow him to be king. Gill paints a portrait of this marriage as a "work in progress," in which the balance of power shifted continually between queen and consort, but Victoria's repeated pregnancies caused a dramatic shift in Albert's favor: he joined her meetings with ministers, and met or corresponded with the most powerful men in England and abroad. His great accomplishment was keeping Great Britain out of the American Civil War; he also served a stint as chancellor of Cambridge, bringing the university into the modern world. Despite their constant battle for dominance, Victoria was always madly in love while Albert was pleased to be adored. A lively, perceptive, impressively researched biography of what Gill terms "a forerunner of today's power couple." 16 pages of color illus.; b&w illus. throughout. (May 19) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
A new look at a famous royal relationship. LYTTON STRACHEY did it. Cecil Woodham-Smith did it. Now Gillian Gill has done it: follow up a distinctive portrait of Florence Nightingale, England's sainted Lady With the Lamp, with a magisterial treatment of Queen Victoria. It's the one-two punch of 19th-century British biography. In "Nightingales," Gill mined newly discovered family correspondence as well as the extensive public record of Nightingale's work from the Crimean War onward, establishing without question the heroic nature and extraordinary accomplishment of her protagonist - features of the life story that were first cast into doubt with Strachey's debunking portrayal in "Eminent Victorians." In "We Two," Gill aims in the opposite direction: the Queen Victoria she gives us in this closely drawn portrait of a royal marriage is a more ordinary woman than we might have supposed. The longest-ruling monarch in British history suffered greatly under what the queen herself called "the yoke" of matrimony, enduring nine pregnancies in the first two decades of her reign - which left her an outsider at her own court, relegated to the "shadow side" of life, as she wrote in a letter of warning to her 17-year-old daughter, Vicky, newly married to Prince Frederick William of Prussia and soon to be pregnant for the first time. Victoria married at 20, and as with so many young brides, the connubial life she got was not the one she'd hoped for. Yet as Queen of England she had, of course, more reason than most to expect better. Gill adroitly establishes Victoria's absolute difference in opportunity from all other British women, and even from most female members of European royalty, who were banned from inheriting their national thrones. "As a social and legal entity," Gill notes, "Victoria was far more man than woman." Although American readers may be surprised to learn that the queen was not the wealthiest woman in Britain (Angela Burdett-Coutts, who inherited a banking fortune, could claim that distinction), she was still the only woman allowed "full, independent legal control over her income and possessions whether or not she was married." On Victoria's accession to the throne one month after her 18th birthday, she found herself at once involved in daily affairs of state and permitted to socialize after hours in ways previously forbidden to the cloistered teenage heiress apparent. Immensely popular with her subjects, Victoria was living "just the sort of life I like," she crowed to her older half-sister Feodora, who had been married off, as Gill puts it, to a "fourth-rank prince with a postage-stamp kingdom" in Germany. Victoria had every reason to believe her new style of life would continue. Gill's analysis of the marriage Victoria made is a brutally persuasive indictment of the social institution that cheated her of the rare independence she was granted by her genetic destiny. Never mind that she ruled the richest and most powerful empire of her day; never mind that she passionately loved her chosen husband, a man just her own age who also happened to be her first cousin, the stirringly handsome Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Never mind that Albert himself was in the anomalous position of having to marry for money. (Gill allows us to feel a more than fleeting compassion for the young man who "could have succeeded as a professor, geologist, botanist, statistician, musician, engineer or bureaucrat," yet "by the standards of his caste" was forbidden to "train, take up a profession and earn money.") Marriage was the great leveler - for the queen anyway. Even as royal rules of precedence required Albert to walk several paces behind his wife in public, the rules of the bedroom and nursery made Victoria subservient to her husband, deferential by convention if not by law. Within a year of tying the knot, she had reason to fear that she had become queen in name alone. Both Victoria and Albert had been reared by tutors from the German middle class with whom they formed close emotional ties. By directing their young charges' education and inculcating in them the principles of virtuous hard work and abstemious living, Victoria's beloved Lehzen and Albert's Florschütz had a democratizing influence on the royal couple that would be hard to overestimate. Victoria and Albert seemed cast from a different mold than their debauched and dissipated royal parents and grandparents, ready to restore dignity to the British monarchy by presenting themselves as a couple not so different from their subjects. In carefully staged snapshots released to the press (taking advantage of new printing and image-making technologies), the royal ménage was pictured on vacation at the seashore, both parents fully engaged in family life. Victoria retired to the nursery, Albert controlled the royal pocketbook and all was right with the world. In Victoria and Albert's family we see the template for our modern-day frumpish Windsors - curiously average sorts who just happen to live in enormous houses and dress in kilts or sport tiaras on certain occasions. Albert was the enforcer of the new code, and Gill explains that the Victorian era, with its celebration of a bland domesticity, should more accurately be called "Albertian" in its origins. Gill shows Victoria herself straining at the bonds, sometimes shockingly so. The ever-pregnant queen was "like a fat tiger," Gill tells us, "content with the cage, answering to the whip, but lashing out from time to time, and daring her tamer to get careless." The woman who became known as "The Grandmother of Europe" for the offspring she sent into royal marriages all across the continent, disliked motherhood intensely. On the eve of her daughter Vicky's wedding she wept, telling Albert: "It is like taking a poor lamb to be sacrificed." BUT the British people hated to see their spirited queen lagging figuratively, if not literally, behind priggish Prince Albert. Aside from his triumph in getting the Crystal Palace built, Albert's accomplishments seemed to impress only his wife. Even she may have clung to him most tenaciously in memory, after his death at 42 from typhoid fever. It was then, in her long withdrawal into mourning, that she wrote so eloquently of "we two," recalling a time "when the world seemed only to be ourselves." Was this Victorian sentiment? Had there ever been such a time? Gill's vivid and deeply reasoned account of Queen Victoria's marriage should be read alongside Phyllis Rose's still trenchant "Parallel Lives," with its portraits of the marriages of five 19th-century British literary lions. The tyrannical Thomas Carlyle and the self-sacrificing Jane Welsh; the two-timing Charles Dickens and the hopelessly overmatched Catherine Hogarth; and prudish John Ruskin, who never managed to bed Effie Gray, are posed against the more companionable alliances of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. It is wonderful to be reminded that Eliot, born in 1819, just six months after Queen Victoria, was able to make one of the most successful "marriages" of the era by not marrying. For Eliot and Lewes - whose cohabitation began at roughly the same time Victoria gave birth to her eighth child, the hemophiliac Prince Leopold - living in defiance of convention permitted "affection, respect and intellectual sympathy" to deepen over the years, and provided an atmosphere in which Eliot was able fully to realize her early intuition that "we have begun life afresh - with new ambitions and new powers." Theirs was the rare Victorian "we two" that would not obliterate the female "I." Megan Marshall is the author of "The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism."
Library Journal Review
Far from mythologizing her legendary subjects, Gill (Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Florence Nightingale) views the marriage of Queen Victoria and Albert of Saxe-Coburg as a modern historian. Outwardly, Victoria and Albert diligently presented the world with a portrait of blissful domesticity (and inflexible morality) that has become synonymous with the age, but their lives were far from perfect. Albert, a minor German prince, was not well received and rarely appreciated in his adopted country. Victoria, proud queen regnant in a fiercely misogynistic era, found herself caught between the realities of her paramount rank and her perceived (and much dreaded) duty to bear children and defer to her husband as lord and master. In attempting to chronicle the relationship of these two, Gill is hardly passing over untrodden ground: readers familiar with Victoria's and Albert's lives will probably not find much revelatory material in her treatment. They will find, however, a frank and intimate discussion of the royal marriage that is addictively readable; no doubt the famously proper queen would not be amused. Recommended for all readers. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/09.]-Tessa L.H. Minchew, Georgia Perimeter Coll., Clarkston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Charlotte and Leopold The folktales of charles perrault and the grimm brothers are surprisingly reliable about the lives of kings and queens in old Europe. Those tales are full of strange and dangerous royal courtships. Kings and queens are unable to conceive a normal child. Queens die in childbirth. Orphan princesses are sorely beset by uncaring fathers, wicked stepmothers, and villainous uncles, and only seven dwarfs or a magic donkey's skin can save them. The solutions are magical, but the problems were not fantasies. European kings and queens were in fact often neglected or abused in childhood. As adults they were plagued by the imperative to find a spouse and produce an heir. They then frequently repeated the cycle of neglect and abuse with their own children. Before Princess Victoria of Kent was born, there lived a Princess Charlotte, her first cousin and very like her in character and ability. If Charlotte had lived and had children, a Saxe-Coburg dynasty would have taken hold in England in 1817, not 1840, and history books might well chronicle the joint reign of Charlotte and Leopold. But Charlotte was a princess that no fairy godmother came to save. Charlotte's parents, George, Prince of Wales (later prince regent, and then King George IV), and Princess Caroline of Brunswick, were first cousins. They had never seen one another before the eve of their wedding. George loathed Caroline on sight and consummated the marriage in a state of insulting inebriation. The two separated nine months before the birth of their only child and thereafter waged an increasingly ugly and public war on one another. He accused her, not unjustly, of being dirty, uncouth, and garrulous. She accused him, not unjustly, of promiscuity, malice, and neglect. Unloved and uncared for, Charlotte was a pawn in her parents' acrimonious marital game. Princess Charlotte emerged from this difficult childhood a woman of considerable abilities, if little education, and possessed of unusual courage and resolution. Wild, headstrong, opinionated, and self- absorbed, Charlotte yet longed for affection and intimacy. At eighteen she had few illusions and fewer friends, and longed to throw off the financial and social straitjacket of her life as an unmarried princess. She was anxious to avoid the fate of her royal aunts, the six talented and beautiful daughters of King George III who as young women were tethered to their dysfunctional parents and barred from marriage. Three in middle age finally escaped into the arms of grotesque bridegrooms, but frustration and boredom gnawed away at the lives of all these princesses. Like the heroines of so many English novels of the period, Princess Charlotte saw marriage as the answer to her problems. She knew that, as second in line of succession to the English throne after her father, she was the most eligible partie in Europe. She also knew that her acceptable marital choices were limited to a handful of unknown foreigners. As two of her spinster aunts had discovered to their cost, tradition and the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 prevented the marriage of an English royal princess with any man, duke or drover, born in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was common practice for princesses to be married to men they had never met, so Charlotte would be lucky to get a glimpse of her suitors at a ball or state dinner. Charlotte's father the prince regent also saw marriage as the solution to the problems he had with his daughter. He doted on tiny, cute girls, but Charlotte resembled her large, loud, voluptuous mother, and he had never loved her. Worse, Charlotte was popular with the English people, while he was greeted by catcalls and averted faces when he made a rare public appearance. The regent planned to marry his daughter off to the Prince of Orange, a distant cousin and the heir to the throne of Holland, Engla Excerpted from We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rules, Partners, Rivals by Gillian Gill All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
