Victoria's Daughters Book

If the average of 4 stars for this book annoys me--it would have driven the previous owner of my copy completely mad. Opinionated garbage spackled with typos and errors. I appreciate marginalia so much and to the reader who went before me with this, special special kudos. I don't think I've ever seen a book marked up so much with angry amendments. But heck, on the flyleaf it says that Queen Mary died in 1923--when no, no she obviously didn't, and the many, many errors merrily roll on from there. So many dates are wrong (like 30%)--and sheesh, the person before me would cross out and write the correct date in the dark blue to the side, followed by exclamation points. In double-checking the penned in corrections each time the anonymous reader was correct, book wrong.

The many times the author gets names incorrect or especially family relationships is legion. I am aware that the Victorian family tree is very interconnected, and many authors keep messing it up (who doublechecks these things?!--I am a newcomer at best to this subject and the last 3 books can't keep nieces/nephews straight from daughters/sons), but this whole book is about a branch on that tree so I expect the author to keep the children and husbands correct at least and a magnificent fail. I don't know what the previous angry reader thought on this tonally--she or he seemed to control themselves to all the factual errors, which were as mentioned above everywhere. Based on the number of !!! and circlings, I would guess royally (haha) pissed off. The tone though is on the nasty side--the author contradicts himself all the time--was Victoria forever frozen in 1861 until death as crabbed widow or in chapters where in her 70s, she had 8 grandkids scampering all around, and living with much loud noise in the nursery right above her bedroom (all the things unthinkable 40 years earlier) as a mellow old granny.

Mr. Packard does not like Victoria and makes that bluntly clear throughout the book. For some reason, he seems almost personally affronted with her reaction of deep mourning in the wake of Alfred's death. He doesn't seem too fond of Vicky either--and dips his toe into some pretty sexist waters with his depictions of her. She was trapped in an impossible situation in Prussia's court, whatever she did would have caused some offense to someone with ramifications--as seen throughout her life. The only times he WOULD praise Victoria it was to bash Vicky. I mean if anything, the monster lurking below everything, the one person you could probably point a finger to and be like "Yep, you are the main cause of WW1" it would be Bismark.

All the sisters were trapped--Vicky, the most gifted, the most stuck. The fact that they were royal AND women made their aspirations a bit harder, but I guess it's good to remember that Vicky did make an impact on history (just the exact opposite of what she wanted), that Alice with her life and death did help make nursing a profession for women, and Louise's sculpture of Victoria is still front and center. As for the other sisters, who while were proficient as professionals in piano, engineering, and needlework, served as secretaries to their mother and translated books from German. (And needlessly censored and destroyed their mother's diaries and journals.)

The lesser sisters, Helena and Beatrice, I think deserve some consideration too--and I don't like the sneering summations of lives--when it seems to me that they did okay in the end. Rich, did their duties, loved their husbands, had kids, and had the money and fame to attract attention into topics they were interested in. One living long enough to play with the current Queen. And his depiction of Beatrice's looks verges on cruel. As a young woman pre-marriage: "Some people even assumed that the imperious cast on her often-sour face and lifting of her rapidly doubling chin when a man so much as looked at her meant that she must be frigid."



Do tell! What else do unnamed people have to say?

For having her weight mentioned so frequently in the book, the accompanying picture doesn't make her out to be anything other than normal, with perhaps a smaller waist than usual. Even photos of her as old lady show a relatively trim, moderately well fed woman. Maybe too much Hanover in her to be gorgeous, but nothing of the ugly obese simpleton that Packard makes her out to be. There's a lot of conjecture on what they were thinking (mostly spiteful things), and damned if they do, damned if they don't. Victoria was too cold and ignoring her children one chapter, too many letters the next. Vicky loves her children too little, then too much. Alice too brainy, but then brainy is what cemented her legacy. Louise too wild, but then too conventional. Not only were the hurdles impossible in their lifetime, but impossible in this book.

It's funny when authors though obviously hate their subjects--like why write a book on people you despise, unless it's like Hitler? Why bother spending time in archives, getting annoyed at their letters and journals and conveniently tucking back info to serve your narrative--all the speculations about Victoria's sanity and obsession with Alfred--I've read her letters and journals directly after his death and what struck me wasn't so much the lavish mourning (which was there and as stylized as Cicero) but the shift a few paragraphs later asking about politics in Portugal and what was happening in Paris or some George Eliot book she loved, accompanied by fanart. Interestingly enough, there is not a mention of John Brown in this book, whatsoever, and barely any mention of Victoria's other relatives (her mother/half-sister/uncle) which all played important roles in the family.

I guess the more you get to know a subject, the more you can spot and pinpoint those serving a special narrative--and not so much the truth at all--but something false built in their head. I still haven't entirely decided on my ultimate view of Queen Victoria. I think she was a lot smarter than is reported and even though the era of her reign bears her name she is grossly underrated. I also think the shift to the right she made later in life was due more towards personal considerations, perhaps than her attitude as a whole (which like her son was a lot more relaxed than her contemporaries) and I think she was conscious of her constitutional role and as "Mother of Europe." I think she's an interesting, multi-layered person beneath the caricature that again spanned flintlocks to dynamite/machine guns, besides the birth of art and technology. This book doesn't really help except for fact-checking practice.