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30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Dutiful Daughter, March 16, 2008
This review is from: The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen Victoria's Youngest Daughter (Hardcover)
Princess Beatrice was the youngest and least well known of the nine children of Queen Victoria. Born just four years before the death of her father Prince Albert, she did not experience the full rigour of an upbringing and education under her father's control, the only one of the family to escape what seems to modern eyes less raising a child than overwhelming it. Beatrice also seems to have avoided her parents' well known tendency to over criticize and over correct their other children. But Beatrice, as the youngest child, was the one chosen by her incredibly self-centered mother to be an eternal comfort and assistant after Albert's death and the marriage of her siblings. Forced into the role of secretary/confidante (and at times psychologist) to her mother when barely out of her teens, Beatrice developed a personality which was quiet, patient, and undemanding throughout the years during which her peers were getting married and raising families. She seems to have rebelled against her mother only once, when she fell in love with and insisted on marrying Prince Henry of Battenberg, who fortunately was also patient enough to agree to be part of Queen Victoria's household rather than establishing his own independent life. Prince Henry died after a decade of marriage, and Beatrice continued to be Victoria's secretary/companion until the Queen died in 1901. Even then Beatrice was not free from her mother, because she had been given the task of editing/censoring the Queen's journals, a task which took her many years and probably resulted in the loss of much valuable material about Victoria's true thoughts and activities, since Beatrice loyally destroyed the originals after making her copies.
This nice, self-effacing lady would not have merited a biography had she not been born royal, but its good to have this one because it sheds light on a life which was lived in the shadow of a more forceful personality. Matthew Dennison writes well, if somewhat archaically (I do not recall running across the word "munificent" even once in a modern book, let alone twice!) There are many photos and reproductions of portraits that I had never seen before, and there are some good descriptions of Beatrice's four children: three sons who were to be even more obscure than their mother (one was a hemophiliac, a tragic reminder of the curse genetics placed on Victoria's descendants) and a daughter who became Queen of Spain (and the mother of two hemophiliac sons.) The Last Princess will make an excellent addition to any collection of royal biographies.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Was Anyone Ever this Selfless?, May 7, 2008
This review is from: The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen Victoria's Youngest Daughter (Hardcover)
Princess Beatrice gave up her private life, her health and most of her happiness in order to be the secretary, confidante and companion of her widowed mother. Starting with the death of her father, Prince Albert, when she was only four years old, her life was a constant reminder of funereal gloom. As her older sisters married and moved away, Princess Beatrice became the Queen's slave in most matters public and private. Such was the Queen's paranoia that her youngest daughter might grow up and want a life of her own, she forbade all talk of marriage in front of the Princess, and punished the girl by not speaking to her for eight months when she dared to fall in love and announced her wish to wed. The marriage was only allowed to go forward, and the Princess forgiven, when the couple agreed to live with the Queen for their married life, with very limited travel (their honeymoon lasted only five days, and the Queen visited for two of them).
I don't think I'd realized just how selfish Queen Victoria was until I read this meticulously researched volume. Princess Beatrice was a far more forgiving and patient woman than I could have ever been, and I veer between being in awe of her, and pitying her.
Matthew Dennison's writing style takes a while to get used to - sometimes he moves back and forth in eras and you have to go back in order to determine just what time frame he's referring to. The text is at times dangerously close to "scholarly" and for this alone I give the book four stars instead of five. I do recommend it, however, for the insights it gives into this complex, frustrating relationship.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A New Bit of Victorian History, December 9, 2009
This review is from: The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen Victoria's Youngest Daughter (Hardcover)
I will not redo the info in the first review. I quite agree with everything in that review. I have always enjoyed reading about Queen Victoria & her era over the years. So I was familiar with some of the information covered. The author does a good job of covering the well known information that Queen Victoria was devoted to Albert. We all know she wrote copiously to her children and grandchildren flung across the globe. It seems like she wrote an especially huge amount to her oldest daughter Vicky, who lived in Germany. In this book, Vicky and her family did not come for the bigger moments in Beatrice's life, like her confirmation or marriage. Which is certainly understandable. It would be a huge undertaking. The author also does a great job of describing how isolated in both age Beatrice was from her sibling and from her peers. Vicky was 17 or 18 years old when Beatrice was born. So literally, her sibling were grown and had their own lives by the time Beatrice was a small child. Beatrice was four years old when Albert died. So, as this book does a great job, her life was overshadowed by the death of her father Prince Albert and by the death of Queen Victoria's mother prior to Albert's death. In this book, we are reminded of how Queen Victoria cloaked herself in grief for literally decades. This book details how different people tried to talk to her and intervene. Crown Princess Vicky and the other sibling every wrote her a group letter, which all signed saying the throne was in danger unless she went into public again. But then as the queen's health declined, they backed out of giving her the letter.
Princess Beatrice has obviously been a neglected, but important part of Queen Victoria's life. It is through the queen's treatment of Beatrice we see how truly self absorbed and bullying she truly was to all around her. The queen actively set out that Beatrice would never be allowed to have friends or to be married. She wrote this in letters to the family. The queen did not mean for Beatrice to meet her future husband. And after he asked for her hand in marriage, Queen Victoria literally did not speak to Beatrice for many months. The queen finally reluctantly agreed to the marriage if the happy couple agreed to live with Victoria and the husband agreed to give up his career. They agreed and lived happily for ten years until his death. I enjoyed reading of this forgotten part of history.
My few disagreements with the book are small. The book goes into detailed accounts of many paintings. Queen Victoria commissioned paintings of all her children on many occassions. She commissioned paintings for special occassions like weddings and battles. The author goes into detail describing paintings that are not listed in the book. Beautiful paintings of Beatrice as a baby. And some he describes as tacky and hideous. But the reader is left to either find the paintings elsewhere or just imagine what these paintings might have looked like, which annoyed me greatly.
It's always interesting to see how history books & biographies arrange the information. Some of the author's arrangements were confusing. Some clumps of information were arranged chronologically and some clumps were arranged more by subject matter. For instance, he covered the fact that Victoria disliked hot weather & loved cold bracing weather. So many quotes were pulled from different times to cover this for several pages. Various servants, included John Brown are covered for several pages. And then the book might go back to covering things by year. At times I was confused as to what time period we were dealing with. Some spans of Beatrice's life were very well covered and then it just seemed to skip ahead many years, but I wasn't sure of how exactly old she was.
It's a well written book I enjoyed reading. The author has a very appealing style of writing. I also appreciated that there were no made up conversational quotes. I find these very annoying in history books.
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