Queen Victoria's Secrets PDF Download

Author: Adrienne Munich
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231104814
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284

View

Book Description
An unconventional figure in an age that excluded women from government, Victoria was accorded prominence unavailable to any male monarch. Yet as Adrienne Munich argues in this fascinating work, the originality of the solid, dour icon that was Victoria lay, paradoxically, in her very ordinariness. The first book to fully investigate the influence of this icon of British history, Queen Victoria's Secrets demonstrates the firm grasp the queen held on the cultural imagination of her country, exploring how Victoria created and maintained her royal authority. Gracefully weaving together feminist, anthropological, and postcolonial approaches, Munich searches out the myriad, often contradictory incarnations of the queen in the minds of her people. How did Victoria convincingly maintain her power for forty years after Prince Albert's death, never giving up her identity as a grieving widow? How did Victorian society's reverential treatment of their queen conflate with the monarch's plain, middle class public image? These are some of the secrets Munich examines in her richly detailed work. In demonstrating the subtle but powerful ways in which Victoria performed significant cultural work, Queen Victoria's Secrets goes against the grain of Victoria scholarship, which has tended to overlook the queen's political and cultural centrality. This stylish, accessible portrait will be of great interest to those who are fascinated by the myth-making and secrets of the Victorian age.

Author: Lucinda Hawksley
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466863900
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

View

Book Description
The secrets of Queen Victoria's sixth child, Princess Louise, may be destined to remain hidden forever. What was so dangerous about this artistic, tempestuous royal that her life has been documented more by rumor and gossip than hard facts? When Lucinda Hawksley started to investigate, often thwarted by inexplicable secrecy, she discovered a fascinating woman, modern before her time, whose story has been shielded for years from public view. Louise was a sculptor and painter, friend to the Pre-Raphaelites and a keen member of the Aesthetic movement. The most feisty of the Victorian princesses, she kicked against her mother's controlling nature and remained fiercely loyal to her brothers-especially the sickly Leopold and the much-maligned Bertie. She sought out other unconventional women, including Josephine Butler and George Eliot, and campaigned for education and health reform and for the rights of women. She battled with her indomitable mother for permission to practice the "masculine" art of sculpture and go to art college-and in doing so became the first British princess to attend a public school. The rumors of Louise's colorful love life persist even today, with hints of love affairs dating as far back as her teenage years, and notable scandals included entanglements with her sculpting tutor Joseph Edgar Boehm and possibly even her sister Princess Beatrice's handsome husband, Liko. True to rebellious form, she refused all royal suitors and became the first member of the royal family, since the sixteenth century, to marry a commoner. She moved with him to Canada when he was appointed Governor-General. Spirited and lively, Queen Victoria's Mysterious Daughter is richly packed with arguments, intrigues, scandals, and secrets, and is a vivid portrait of a princess desperate to escape her inheritance.

Author: Jan Bondeson
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1445612259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160

View

Book Description
The amazing tale of Britain's first celebrity stalker. After her coronation in 1838, Queen Victoria was a frightened young woman. She was relentlessly pursued by a weird teenager, Edward, 'the Boy' Jones, who had an uncanny ability to sneak into Buckingham Palace without being detected. Once, he broke into her bedroom and stole her underwear, and at least twice he sat on the throne.

Author: Deborah Cadbury
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610398475
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482

View

Book Description
A captivating exploration of the role in which Queen Victoria exerted the most international power and influence: as a matchmaking grandmother. As her reign approached its sixth decade, Queen Victoria's grandchildren numbered over thirty, and to maintain and increase British royal power, she was determined to maneuver them into a series of dynastic marriages with the royal houses of Europe. Yet for all their apparent obedience, her grandchildren often had plans of their own, fueled by strong wills and romantic hearts. Victoria's matchmaking plans were further complicated by the tumultuous international upheavals of the time: revolution and war were in the air, and kings and queens, princes and princesses were vulnerable targets. Queen Victoria's Matchmaking travels through the glittering, decadent palaces of Europe from London to Saint Petersburg, weaving in scandals, political machinations and family tensions to enthralling effect. It is at once an intimate portrait of a royal family and an examination of the conflict caused by the marriages the Queen arranged. At the heart of it all is Victoria herself: doting grandmother one moment, determined Queen Empress the next.

Author: Terry Deary
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780702306662
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 144

View

Book Description
Brand new from the bestselling team behind Horrible Histories! It's time to delve into the totally true (sort of) and incredibly intriguing pages of Queen Victoria's Secret Diary. Horrible Histories' Secret Diaries of the most extraordinary (and Horrible) characters of all time will blow your mind.

Author: Roland Perry
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781760291037
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 400

View

Book Description
The intensely revealing and entertaining account of a great royal secret and hidden love story - an unbuttoned history of Queen Victoria's loves and intrigues.

Author: Ellen Datlow
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 1429960914
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

View

Book Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Year An anthology featuring all-original tales of gaslamp fantasy from bestselling and award-winning authors including Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked. "Gaslamp Fantasy," or historical fantasy set in a magical version of the nineteenth century, has long been popular with readers and writers alike. A number of wonderful fantasy novels owe their inspiration to works by nineteenth-century writers ranging from Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Meredith to Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and William Morris. And, of course, the entire steampunk genre and subculture owes more than a little to literature inspired by this period. Queen Victoria's Book of Spells is an anthology for everyone who loves these works of neo-Victorian fiction, and wishes to explore the wide variety of ways that modern fantasists are using nineteenth-century settings, characters, and themes. These approaches stretch from steampunk fiction to the Austen-and-Trollope inspired works that some critics call Fantasy of Manners, all of which fit under the larger umbrella of Gaslamp Fantasy. The result is eighteen stories by experts from the fantasy, horror, mainstream, and young adult fields, including both bestselling writers and exciting new talents, who present a bewitching vision of a nineteenth century invested (or cursed!) with magic. Includes short stories by Delia Sherman, Jeffrey Ford, Genevieve Valentine, Maureen McHugh, Kathe Koja, Elizabeth Wein, Elizabeth Bear, James P. Blaylock, Kaaron Warren, Leanna Renee Hieber, Dale Bailey, Veronica Schanoes, Catherynne M. Valente, Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer, Jane Yolen, Gregory Maguire, Tanith Lee, Theodora Goss. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Author: Gillian Gill
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345514920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

View

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "[A] delectable double bio . . . Talk about Victoria’s secret. . . . A fascinating portrait of a genuine love match, but one in which the partners dealt with surprisingly modern issues.” —USA Today It was the most influential marriage of the nineteenth century—and one of history’ s most enduring love stories. Traditional biographies tell us that Queen Victoria inherited the throne as a naïve teenager, when the British Empire was at the height of its power, and seemed doomed to find failure as a monarch and misery as a woman until she married her German cousin Albert and accepted him as her lord and master. Now renowned chronicler Gillian Gill turns this familiar story on its head, revealing a strong, feisty queen and a brilliant, fragile prince working together to build a family based on support, trust, and fidelity, qualities neither had seen much of as children. The love affair that emerges is far more captivating, complex, and relevant than that depicted in any previous account. The epic relationship began poorly. The cousins first met as teenagers for a few brief, awkward, chaperoned weeks in 1836. At seventeen, charming rather than beautiful, Victoria already “showed signs of wanting her own way.” Albert, the boy who had been groomed for her since birth, was chubby, self-absorbed, and showed no interest in girls, let alone this princess. So when they met again in 1839 as queen and presumed prince-consort-to-be, neither had particularly high hopes. But the queen was delighted to discover a grown man, refined, accomplished, and whiskered. “Albert is beautiful!” Victoria wrote, and she proposed just three days later. As Gill reveals, Victoria and Albert entered their marriage longing for intimate companionship, yet each was determined to be the ruler. This dynamic would continue through the years—each spouse, headstrong and impassioned, eager to lead the marriage on his or her own terms. For two decades, Victoria and Albert engaged in a very public contest for dominance. Against all odds, the marriage succeeded, but it was always a work in progress. And in the end, it was Albert’s early death that set the Queen free to create the myth of her marriage as a peaceful idyll and her husband as Galahad, pure and perfect. As Gill shows, the marriage of Victoria and Albert was great not because it was perfect but because it was passionate and complicated. Wonderfully nuanced, surprising, often acerbic—and informed by revealing excerpts from the pair’s journals and letters—We Two is a revolutionary portrait of a queen and her prince, a fascinating modern perspective on a couple who have become a legend. BONUS: This edition contains a reader's guide.

Author: Continental Historical Society (U.S.)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780960990009
Category : Literary forgeries and mystifications
Languages : en
Pages : 289

View

Book Description

Author: Ronald Clark
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1448210968
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

View

Book Description
A sudden intolerably bright fireball lights up a remote and deserted Indian plateau. Searing heat melts rock into incandescent pools of glowing liquid. The earth heaves. A monstrous thunderclap of sound reverberates over the land. An ominous mushroom-shaped cloud boils skywards. For years afterwards, strange plants and even stranger human mutants are discovered in the area, warped spawn of a mysterious and deadly force. Just another atomic test? Not exactly. Because it was Professor Huxtable's brainchild. And the professor is one of the most devoted and loyal servants of Queen Victoria...