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    Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions
    Unavailable
    Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions
    Unavailable
    Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions
    Ebook226 pages5 hours

    Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions

    By Matthew Dennison

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A fresh, witty, accessible life of Queen Victoria. Not since Lytton Strachey has the irony, contradictions and influence of this Queen been treated with such flourish or biographical insight.

    'Queen Victoria had a very complicated and psychologically fascinating personality and only a very talented biographer could get to the key of her character. Fortunately in Matthew Dennison's pithy, well-researched, beautifully written and very accessible book, she has found one' Andrew Roberts

    Queen Victoria is Britain’s queen of contradictions. In her combination of deep sentimentality and bombast; cultural imperialism and imperial compassion; fear of intellectualism and excitement at technology; romanticism and prudishness, she became a spirit of the age to which she gave her name.

    Victoria embraced photography, railway travel and modern art; she resisted compulsory education for the working classes, recommended for a leading women’s rights campaigner ‘a good whipping’ and detested smoking. She may or may not have been amused.

    Meanwhile she reinvented the monarchy and wrestled with personal reinvention. She lived in the shadow of her mother and then under the tutelage of her husband; finally she embraced self-reliance during her long widowhood. Fresh, witty and accessible, Queen Victoria is a compelling assessment of Victoria’s mercurial character and impact, written with the irony, flourish and insight that this Queen and her rule so richly deserve.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateAug 15, 2013
    ISBN9780007504565
    Unavailable
    Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions
    Author

    Matthew Dennison

    Matthew Dennison is the author of seven critically acclaimed works of non-fiction, including Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, a Book of the Year in The Times, Spectator, Independent and Observer. His most recent book is Over the Hills and Far Away: The Life of Beatrix Potter. He is a contributor to Country Life and Telegraph.

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