Victoria, R.I.

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Very Good/Good. 1964. Hard Cover. 8vo 029776635X Second impression. Dust jacket large chunk missing from front, price clipped, in clear protective sleeve. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. Photographs on plates. 635 pages clean and tight. Queen Victoria, a woman of diminutive stature and superabundant temperament, often lamented that fate had not decreed for her the life of a simple Hausfrau. Yet she gave her name to something more than an age. Lady Longford has made an important contribution to the present interest in Victorian biographies with a full-scale life of the great Queen herself. Her narrative preserves the fascinating interweaving of State with family affairs which characterised Queen Victoria's unprecedented career; the author's grasp of politics and her understanding of the special problems which confront a woman who is not only a Queen but also mother of a large, high-spirited family, make this book unique. Lady Longford has been privileged to draw upon material from the Royal Archives to which she has had unrestricted access, in-eluding unpublished passages from Queen Victoria's celebrated Journals, as well as many private collections. There is much that is new in her assessments of the galaxy of colourful personalities which crowd these pages: Victoria and Albert, Melbourne and Flora Hastings, Conroy and Lehzen, Gladstone and Disraeli, John Brown and the Munshi, Lord Salisbury and the Kaiser. The young Queen is shown tormented by an unhappy childhood, enraptured by a love-match (on both sides), tantalised by an all too brief period of happy marriage. The effects of the Prince Consort's death, which ends Part I, are treated in depth so that for the first time the shock which drove Queen Victoria into her long retirement seems easy to understand. In Part II the Queen's renowned qualities, whether admirable or otherwise, gradually mature. Alongside them appear some surprising traits which combine to present her in a fresh, thoroughly human light. Queen Victoria is apt to he dismissed in the twentieth century as an insufferable idol; Lady Longford regards her with undisguised affection and respect-respect for the iron sense of duty which impelled the secluded widow to emerge at last and rule her Empire as a mother, her family as a Queen. .