This is an excellent biography. And I want to break this down a bit, because it does several things at once and all of them well.
1. It's a chronicle of Queen Victoria's life with a perfect blend of context and anecdote. I really think this is the key to a good biography. You need enough context to understand why a person's actions matter, what makes them noteworthy or remarkable. And you need enough anecdotal detail to bring the person to life and liven up the pace.
2. It also tackles the question of: how does Victoria's image in the popular imagination differ from the reality of who she was, and why? Because the gap between the two is significant and--this is where it gets really interesting--she's not a distant historical figure at all.
Victoria reigned throughout most of the 19th century. She died in the 20th. She was a subject of significant historical interest from the moment she was crowned at 16, she kept a daily diary, many of her letters have been preserved, people who knew her took care to record their experiences and impressions. With such an abundance of source material to work with, so how did we get it so wrong?
The author--Julia Baird--does a pretty decent job of answering that question. This is possible partly because the history is recent enough that there's plenty of source material, but distant enough that distortions both intentional and accidental have had time to gel into a false narrative.
So the book does two things, primarily. It chronicles Victoria's life and it analyzes how history is made (and distorted). Both are pretty knotty.
Victoria lived to be 80, and most of those 80 years deserve to be covered. She had relationships with half-a-dozen different Prime Ministers, she acquired the title of Empress and lived long enough to see that empire begin to fragment, she oversaw two significant wars and a host of small ones. She was born before the age of rail and died in a world with cars. Providing context through a span of time that long requires some pretty judicious picking and choosing.
I might have wished for a little more, but I respected all of Baird's choices. She keeps the focus on Victoria--and pretty strongly on Victoria's personal life, on how her relationships broadened or narrowed her understanding of the role of Queen, the scope of her duties.
The fulcrum around which her views changed was Albert, and it was absolutely fascinating to read about Albert's ambitions, the many ways he cosseted and also belittled Victoria, until the prince who arrived in England as a pretty foreigner who Victoria wanted to keep out of politics ended up wielding power equal to hers, and at times overshadowing her influence with his own.
I kept thinking: if he'd been a woman, I'd have rooted for him. But he wasn't, and my lasting impression is pretty mixed.
But Albert died young. Victoria ruled for forty years as a widow, twice as long as she'd been married, and I don't think it's a coincidence that she didn't marry again. Or that when she took a lover, she picked a commoner with no ambitions of his own. Her famously extended mourning was much more strategic than I'd imagined.
Victoria's greatest strength was probably her understanding of what today we call 'optics'--she was a very skilled mistress of her own reputation. Which is ironic, considering how it's subsequently been manipulated.
One of the obvious distortions, just to give a quick and clear example, is that Victoria was a prude. No, not at all. Kind of the opposite. She was a total horndog. She married Albert because he was hot, enthused to her diary about how much she enjoyed sex, had eight children & when all that childbirth affected her health, she was most worried about whether or not she'd be able to keep having sex.
So what happened? A lot, actually. After Victoria died, her daughter Beatrice edited her diary & deleted everything she found inappropriate--which was a lot. Apparently an archivist managed to preserve a few pages from the purge, a little glimpse into all we lost.
But the whole family conspired to erase bits of Victoria's life they didn't like--like her relationship with her groom, John Brown. She kept her instructions for her own burial nearby at all times in a sealed envelope, so that it couldn't be destroyed, so that (among other things) she could be buried with a wedding ring from John Brown on her finger. Which was then covered with gauze, so her children wouldn't see it there.
So the family wanted to craft the narrative after she died, and they seized the opportunity to write the story their way--often against her stated preferences.
But there's so much more. Victoria's reputation is tangled with Albert's, partly because they presented a unified front. They were close, they acted as a pair, Victoria bent over backwards to give him as much legitimacy as possible. Most of his legacy has been folded into hers, and is now mistaken for hers.
Historians contributed to the problem. Baird points out that many historians writing biographies of Victoria primarily consulted the letters that she wrote to prominent historical figures. Which--hey--as mentioned, she lived a long life. You have to pick and choose. But the prominent historical figures whose correspondence they paid attention to were men, and many of them politicians. Some of these biographers wrote that Victoria wasn't very maternal, or didn't care much about her children, when really she didn't spent much time writing to the Prime Minister about her children. A broader review (of, for example, letters to female friends) yielded different results.
Baird weaves all of this together into a cohesive and entertaining narrative. Even though I've spent a lot of time reading and writing about the Victorian era I found much of it really surprising. Very strong recommend.