Queen Victoria: Born to Succeed

1965, 1971 Pyramid Books edition
Elizabeth Longford
Queen Victoria: Born to Succeed
Original price unknown, purchase price $1.75
Very worn paperback with covers detached
B

Longford presents a sympathetic view of Britain's longest-reigning monarch.  (Victoria's great-great-granddaughter is currently #2.)  She contradicts both the image of Victoria as stodgy and the counter-image of her as a lusty descendant of the Hanoverians, who took John Brown as a lover after wearing out poor Prince Albert.  Longford's Victoria had a sense of humour (she didn't always say, "We are not amused") and was in some ways both innocent and romantic.  She also would've believed that the personal is political (and vice versa), although not in the way late-20th-century feminists would, since she let her feelings about the various Prime Ministers shape how she dealt with them. 

The book captures the various sides of Victoria, contradictions and all.  It would benefit from a family tree-- I couldn't keep track of all the grandkids, including the ones that married each other-- although not everyone was equally worth keeping track of.  I really enjoyed the glimpses of Kaiser Wilhelm as a bratty little boy, yet I was touched by his grief for his grandmother.  There are no villains in this book, except that Longford seems to have hated feminist writer Harriet Martineau.  I suspect the title is an ironic pun, since no one expected Victoria to succeed her uncles to the throne, but she did and was very successful.

Longford herself lived a long, interesting life, from 1906 to 2002.  She married the future Earl of Longford (her actual married name was Pakenham), wrote other historical works besides this one, and had eight children, one of them Antonia Fraser, herself a historian.  Fraser's Mary Queen of Scots will be coming up in 1969.  (And her daughter, Flora Fraser, wrote a 2006 book which I've read but don't own, about George III's daughters, Victoria's aunts.  Flora's sister Rebecca wrote a non-royal biography, of the Brontës, which we'll get to in 1988.)