Queen Victoria

(Paperback)

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Description

Drawing upon Queen Victoria's previously unpublished journals, Elizabeth Longford's classic biography recalls the contrasts and curiosities of an earlier era with exquisite detail - and transforms the queen from a severe, time-worn effigy into a human being who loved, feared and fumed.

Longford probes the contradictions of a woman who wore a bonnet instead of a crown at her Golden Jubilee and yet was recognised always as both dignified and formidable. She chronicles both the Queen's public life and her emotional travails, including surprisingly stormy passages in her and Prince Albert's otherwise loving marriage. A refreshingly human image of the Queen emerges: voluble, passionate, politic and articulate, with an irresistible mixture of grandeur and simplicity.

Reviews

It is hard to imagine how Lady Longford's detailed and vivid volume could have been bettered . . . scholarly yet racily readable, witty yet wise - Sunday Times

A full, authoritative study - The Spectator

Dazzlingly readable, and very enjoyable

Very few biographies which have reached the public in recent years can have as good a claim to be called "definitive" as has Elizabeth Longford's life of Queen Victoria - New York Books

Author Bio

Elizabeth Pakenham CBE (otherwise known as Elizabeth Longford) was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a lifelong socialist, and the author of several hugely acclaimed biographies. She wrote a celebrated two-volume biography of Wellington, and biographies of Winston Churchill and the Queen Mother. Victoria was her second book.

She had eight children with her husband Frank Pakenham, among them historians Lady Antonia Fraser and Thomas Pakenham. She died on 23 October 2002.