Dimensions
128 x 198 x 13mm
Wife, Mother, Ruler.
Queen Victoria came to the throne almost without resources, under threat from republicanism, in a period of social, political and economic turbulence. She died, having revived the failing image of the British monarch, head of one of the world's richest families.
Queen Victoria was the first monarch in British history to combine the "public" role of head of state with the "private" one of wife and mother. Alone among married women she was not governed by laws which involved surrendering both name and fortune to one's husband. Yet she herself did not support the movement for what she called "this mad wicked folly of women's rights".
Nevertheless, the presence of a female in the highest political position in the country had marked and complex effects, which are brilliantly drawn out by Dorothy Thompson in this intriguing and innovative book on the real woman behind the myth of the puritanical and unamused monarch.
