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"[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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 19, 2009 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780345514929
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780345514929
- File size: 4477 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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March 30, 2009
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 1, 2009
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., ClarkstonCopyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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