This is a painstakingly researched and well written biography which I poked along in for quite some time- picking it up and putting it down but not because I was bored. I'll admit it's much easier to watch the PBS series than to read this lengthy book but the book is ultimately more rewarding. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. This is not a beach book necessarily but it's entertaining because it's about a fascinating woman. Highly recommend for anyone who likes biographies.

"Victoria" is a well-written biography that manages to tackle sensitive subjects (like John Brown) with a reasonable, human eye. The author creates a compelling image of a woman who exercised power despite her own contradictory beliefs about gender roles, and she does so without excusing Victoria for her flaws. (Such as her treatment of Gladstone.) The biography is a well researched snapshot of the political and social issues sweeping western Europe through the latter half of the 19th century, and to its credit, is also very readable. Well done!

I found this to be a fascinating and very readable book. Victoria was a complex and interesting woman. This book is in some ways a well-researched yet traditional biography. We learn about Victoria and her life in great detail. But really, this is so much more. Baird makes Victoria come alive in all her idiosyncrasies, opinions, and larger-than-life attitudes. It is easy to see Victoria as just the woman who mourned her husband and quietly ruled for years and years. This book does an excellent job of going beyond that and helping Victoria become a real, complex person.

Oh my goodness. A brilliant read. This is, as it says, an intimate biography of the woman who ruled an empire.

With all the rage from the fabulous new Masterpiece series, this book is sure to be a hit. It is very detailed, without being boring and dragging on. It's so intriguing and holds your attention. I love to learn about the royals of England and this book did NOT disappoint.

Who knew that Victoria's daughter, Beatrice, burned most of her writings to protect her mother's image? Who knew that she had a step-sister that was her best friend? Just some of the little tidbits you will learn as you read through this amazing biography.

Please, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. Thank you for this book in exchange for my review. As always, this is my honest opinion. Here's to many more!

I found this book an incredibly informative portrait of Queen Victoria. It delved deep into her personal life, giving the reader a look at the full person, not just the public persona.

I admittedly knew vertpy little about the life of Queen Victoria. This was a very readable, well researched bio of Queen Victoria.

My Thoughts:

Coronation
More than 600 pages. More than 80 years of life. More than 60 years on the throne. Some of the best known names in world history. Some of the greatest changes in world history. One of the great love stories. One woman we think we understand. After all, we've read our history books. We've watched the movies.

I didn't know the half of it. Baird schooled me not just on Victoria's life, but on the lives of her family, her place in the world, and world politics in her life time. I tend to learn history one place or one person at at time, often losing track of where that person or place fit into the greater world. Baird does an excellent job of grounding readers on world events throughout Victoria's life, without getting too mired down in them and losing track of her subject.

Suffice to say that Victoria lived in a time of massive changes in the world: the overthrow of monarchies, the surge of the industrial revolution, and the dawn of the suffragette movement. She reigned through wars, saw her family married into the monarchies of other powers, and her life intermingled with most of the most famous people of her time.

The book is slow going; those pages are tiny print packed with information. Baird had unprecedented access to diaries, letters and papers which allowed her to paint an incredible full and nuanced portrait of a queen who was so much more complex than most of us realize.

We so often think of Victoria in one of two ways - the deeply devoted wife that spent the rest of her life in mourning after the death of her husband or as a cranky looking, fat old woman. She was, in fact, both of those things. But she was also a a feisty queen who was prone to give her prime ministers hell, a woman who loved to laugh, a ruler who reveled in her country's strength but preferred peace to war, a woman whose beloved husband may not have been the greatest love of her life, a woman who was so desperate for someone to care for her that she allowed herself to be hoodwinked, and a person who often doubted her own knowledge.


With John Brown, who may have been
Victoria's great love (left) and Munshi Abdul
Karim, (who abused Victoria's trust (right).
I'd always thought of Victoria as something of an super hero for women. But it turns out she wasn't entirely the paragon of feminism I'd imagined. Partly because the queen just didn't have as much power as I'd thought. Then there was the relationship she had with Prince Albert. She called him "my Lord and Master!" I mean, I know it was kind of the thing to do in those days but she was the queen! Also, she was strongly opposed to the suffragette movement and reveled in the love her country showered on her for being the mother figurehead.

You may recall that I don't keep very many books once I've read them. This one is a keeper because of the wealth of historical information it contains. Unfortunately, my copy is an egalley, which will be unreadable in a few more days. I may just have to buy myself a copy

The British monarchy is experiencing a rise in pop culture this winter with two new literary releases about Queen Victoria, a new television series, Victoria on PBS, and the Netflix program, The Crown. In Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire by Julia Baird we get a broad investigation into the reign of Britain’s, second longest ruling monarch.

Queen Victoria had many qualities, and Baird makes a note to point out a few, such as caustic, selfish, dismissive, demanding, but loyal and kind. She sounds like a lot of women I know, myself included. However, her career, while long and prosperous, was not without its critics and strife. Victoria: The Queen differs from another recent release Victoria by Daisy Goodwin. This telling is not so dishy or gushy. For romance fans, there is a noted difference from the fictionalized version in the character description of the men in Queen Victoria’s life. One of Queen Victoria’s first crushes, Lord Melbourne, is less the charmer in Baird’s telling than in other books, but the young queen remains a stage five clinger. She was more than her infatuations, although they played a remarkable role in her rule. She wielded great power but was not unlike most women. She was a wife and mother, had family drama, and had a tough job. However, the emphasis Baird places on Queen Victoria’s exhaustion as a young working mother falls flat. News flash, every mother feels that way and to suggest that Queen Victoria was somehow more unique because of it is off-putting. However, you cannot deny her sense of responsibility and hard work.

Victoria: The Queen stumbles when it drifts too far from the monarch. Numerous soliloquies about European royalty and political wrangling, at times, seem out-of-place. Though thorough, they are often dull and flat, which bogs down the narrative. Yes, these happenings were historically significant they come across as tedious and repetitious, making this less a biography and more an overview of the 19th century. Still, when the ole gal is front and center, Victoria: The Queen shines best.

This was a well-researched biography full of fascinating detail, and I greatly enjoyed it.

Victoria was an amazing queen who ruled the British Empire when it was at its largest and until recently she was longest reigning monarch of Great Britain. She was a person of many contradictions, for example despite being a queen who worked managing a large empire she looked down on women who had to work and were fighting for their own rights. In this era women were considered the property of the men in their lives and despite being a queen who fought to maintain control she had little sympathy for other women who were fighting for their rights.

She had an unhappy childhood and was known to throw temper tantrum to get her way. Her relationship with her mother, the Duchess of Kent was a constant battle of wills. Her mother insisted that someone hold her hand whenever she walked and she was forced to sleep in the same room as her mother. However, her worst mistake was to let John Conroy bully the young girl and attempt to force her to sign a document making her mother (and therefore him) regent of the empire so they could rule in her stead. She never totally forgave her mother for they way they treated her and that they had a relationship at all was due to Albert.

It’s a shame that her daughter, Beatrice destroyed and rewrote so much of her mother's original letters and diaries. In an effort to portray her mother as a perfect example of Victorian morality she censored her mothers’ writings, destroying any that showed that she was a woman with normal feeling and desires. In an era when many women thought of sex as a duty that had to be preformed in order to have children, Victoria was a woman who relished this part of her relationship with her beloved Albert. Despite the danger she faced bearing children and the damage it caused to her health she refused to entertain the idea of limiting their marital intimacies.

This is an entertaining and enjoyable novel about an amazing woman who ruled twenty percent of the world’s landmass, raised nine children who would link her through marriage to almost every ruling European monarch and who fought for her right to be more than just a figurehead in an era when women were not thought of as having the intelligence to rule without being led by a man.

4.5 /5 STARS: **I want to thank the author and/or publisher for providing me with a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review; all opinions are mine.**

's. Baird clearly researched Victoriia's life, but I found the book dry because the focus seemed to be primarily on the politics of the time and not Victoria, Albert, and their family. I wanted to learn more about Victoria, whom I greatly admire, and I was disappointed.

Julia Baird humanizes Victoria, showing the uncertainties, biases, grudges, passions and whimsies masked by the dour images of the unsmiling widow with which we have become so familiar. An entertaining, gossipy read without the excruciating what-she-ate-for-breakfast level of detail which mires so many biographies.

Beautifully written, Julia Baird presents a well-researched portrait of a three-dimensional Victoria -- the headstrong ingénue, the infatuated bride, the widowed queen - constantly trying to maintain her personal and monarchical identity in the era that is defined by her reign..

A clear, well-referenced account of Queen Victoria's life. Includes discussion of personal and political issues in her lifetime. Highly recommended.

To write this new biography of Queen Victoria, Baird got unprecedented access to Royal Archives. Victoria’s daughter, Beatrice, had been left with the job of expurgating Victoria’s journals and letters and she did quite a hatchet job on them, removing anything that might cause her mother to be seen in a less than perfect light. What she didn’t realize was that someone at the Archives took a photo of each page, preserving Victoria’s words. Baird was given access to this treasure trove. This allows us to see the dichotomy that Victoria lived with in more detail than in the past; women of her day were supposed to be meek and submissive, while she ruled the biggest empire England ever had. Wives were supposed to obey their husbands, but her husband was consort and prince only and not the king. Women were pretty much seen as being sexless, while Victoria had a strong libido and enjoyed having sex (the Victorian era’s extreme sexual modesty actually came from Prince Albert, not Victoria). Women were supposed to be natural mothers; she hated being pregnant and was ambivalent about children. She was the supreme ruler of the Empire, but didn’t believe women should be able to vote.

Most of the book is, of course, nothing new. Her reign has been well documented already. Baird’s writing style leaves something to be desired- she will be writing about one subject, then take off on a tangent like a dog going “Squirrel!”. Some things are out of chronological order, which is confusing. But I found the book mostly very interesting (I really had little interest in the details of her dealings with Parliament), despite already knowing a fair bit about Victoria. Don’t expect anything earthshaking, but rather a portrait of a complex woman about whom many myths have been woven.