Customer Reviews

An Uncommon Woman - The Empress Frederick: Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm

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Hannah Pakula's fascinating portrayal of the life of Vicky, eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, wife of Kaiser Frederick and mother of Kaiser Wilhelm, provides insight on a woman largely ignored in history. Surrounded by historical luminaries, Vicky's often unhappy and frustrating life was glanced over by biographers and history books until Ms. Pakula took up her cause - and we are lucky she did. Pakula's exhaustive and meticulous research and excellent biographical abilities have created an intriguing portrait of a women maltreated by just about everyone - from her domineering mother and jealous mother-in-law, to her ungrateful children, to the domineering Otto von Bismarck. Vicky somehow found the strength to overcome all of the strong personalities in her life and forge a path for herself that centered on charity work and supporting her kind but long-suffering husband, Crown Prince (and later, for a brief time, Kaiser) Friedrich.

Vicky's intelligence is legendary, and she often saw political situations more clearly than those in power did. Her constant correspondence with her mother, which is heavily excerpted by Pakula, provides fascinating insight to the Princess' attributes and weaknesses. It also makes me thankful that I was not a daughter of Queen Victoria - the criticism and guilt the monarch heaped on her eldest daughter is criminal. But I suppose that dealing with her abusive mother helped steel Vicky for the horrific behavior of her children, particularly that of her two eldest - Charlotte and the future Kaiser Wilhelm.

Ms. Pakula infuses "An Uncommon Woman" with large doses of well-researched historical and political information, which helps to orient the reader and affords insight on the true scope of the situations Vicky dealt with in her daily life. The reader will come away from "An Uncommon Woman" with a decent understanding of British and German politics of the era. The book is very well organized. Pakula's writing style is clean and concise, which is helpful due to the large amount of historical information she provides. I felt that I received an extremely well-rounded and unbiased view of Vicky, who is a fascinating figure and certainly deserves the dedication that Pakula has obviously invested in her research and writing of this book.

Pakula has done an excellent job of providing an extremely thorough account of Empress Frederick, who was truly a most uncommon woman.

Vicky, Princess Royal of Great Britain and Empress Frederick of Germany, was raised by her parents Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with a specific purpose. She was to be the instrument by which the divided Germany of her youth was to be unified and remade in the image of Britain, a constitutional monarchy with leanings towards liberal democracy. Vicky did her best to accomplish this, and to a point she succeeded. She was a great and positive influence on her husband Frederick (Fritz) and helped wean him away from the Prussian militarism in which he had been raised. Unfortunately, Vicky was unable to overcome the influence of Otto von Bismarck on her father in law Kaiser William I. Bismarck united Germany, but as an absolute monarchy with only a travesty of representative government. More tragic was Vicky's failure to influence her son and Fritz's heir, the future Kaiser William II. When "Willy" came to the throne after Fritz's tragic death in 1888, he inexorably led Germany down the road to World War I.

Since Vicky failed, why read her story? Because she was a brilliant, brave, charming, stubborn woman dedicated to her principles. She loved her family and both her countries with all her heart. Today she should be remembered as a woman who could have changed so much history for the better had she only had the chance.

You will feel great sympathy towards Vicky, the Empress Frederick, who was an unfortunate hostage to the intrigues of the German court. Sympathy will soon give way to awe at her courage and determination to do her best while having to perform the impossible: being all things to all people.

Vicky was seen as the catalyst for change in Germany. Her parents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert did not like the autocratic, militaristic way in which Emperor Wilhelm I was running Prussia. Instead, they visualized a united German nation with a government much like that of England. Their plan was to sow seeds of liberalism and constitutional monarchy through their daughter and her marriage to Wilhelm's son, Prince Frederick (Fritz). In preparation for the eventual match, Vicky was schooled in politics and German life by Prince Albert. Eventually, she and Fritz would be Emperor and Empress of Prussia, and could bring about German unity.

Little did Vicky know that upon arriving in Berlin, she was at a disadvantage from the start.

As the daughter of Queen Victoria, she was encouraged to retain her Englishness yet was expected to be a Prussian wife and princess. Her efforts to raise her eldest son Willy as Prince Albert had raised her backfired. Her tendency to over-criticize (a trait passed on from Victoria) turned the young Wilhelm away, and he grew up under his thoroughly Prussian grandfather Wilhelm. Otto von Bismarck had seen his own chance to manipulate the future emperor, and along with the groveling royal court, Willy was turned into a bombastic power fanatic.

Her relationship with Fritz was not seen as loving, but as an English princess scheming to Anglicize the House of Hohenzollern. Vicky was painted as "die Englanderin", unfaithful to Germany and a demon on the shoulder of her husband, whom she 'manipulated'.

Hopes that Fritz's mother, Empress Augusta, would watch over Vicky were dashed. Augusta was known to be very liberal and free-thinking, unusual for royal women of the time. In her they thought they had an ally, but both the Queen and Vicky would be sorely disappointed. The once-progressive Augusta had seen her marriage to Emperor Wilhelm unravel over the years, and as a result she became a bitter, self-absorbed woman. She gave Vicky little support in her new role.

When they finally became Emperor and Empress, Vicky and Fritz had precious little time to implement any real changes. Fritz died from cancer of the larynx three months into his reign. Upon his passing, Vicky was left alone and devoid of support or influence. Your heart cries at the unfairness of brilliant minds wasted, while Willy becomes Kaiser Wilhelm II - egotistical, manipulative, and dangerous.

Thankfully, Vicky did not live to see the destruction of the Hohenzollern dynasty when Wilhelm II pulled Germany and England into a devastating world war. After fighting his own relations across Europe, he headed into exile, never to see the throne again. Albert's catalyst did indeed create a change, but not in the way he had expected. Germany would be unified, but the reigning royal house would fall from power, never to recover. -MandysRoyalty.org

This book is what is known as a "tome" and I would strongly advise those who aren't ardent admirers of this period in history and/or Empress Frederick to skip it altogether. On the positive side, the wealth of information presented here is astounding and the research that Ms. Pakula must have undertaken to write this book is equally impressive; Ms. Pakula has a vast knowledge of European courts of the era and of all the assorted oddball royal personages that scuttled from palace to palace and she also possesses an admirable grasp of European history. I admire all the painstaking work it required to bring this massive book to fruition and I commend Ms. Pakula for being able to decipher the workings of Europe at this time and write it all down in orderly sequence. On the negative side, the book, for all it's length and breadth, fails to bring the Empress Frederick (Vicky) alive as a living human being. Quoting an endless array of letters between Vicky and her mother, Queen Victoria, Ms. Pakula seeks to present Vicky as a person through her correspondence with very few observations of her own and I finished the book wondering what Vicky was REALLY like, unlike Daphne Bennett's biography of Vicky which, though not as painstakingly detailed with historical facts, left the reader with the distinct impression of knowing the Empress Frederick as you would an old friend. I understand the necessity of providing historical background (after all, Vicky lived through a very vivid period of German history), but frequently pages went by and Vicky and her family weren't even mentioned. For instance, the death of her son Waldemar was one of the worst tragedies of Vicky's life; likewise, the death of her beloved Fritz and her son Sigismund. These tragedies and, more importantly, what they did to Vicky emotionally, were almost glossed over as though they were inconsequential, at best. It is also common knowledge that Vicky and her husband Fritz had one of the most passionate of royal marriages, but if a person didn't know this they would think, by reading this book, that these two much-aligned people were just the average royal married couple. The person who seemed to capture Ms. Pakula's imagination even more than her subject was Bismarck, who appears incessantly throughout the book - again, understandably but frankly, I got tired wading through page upon page about Bismarck and his political machinations. If I wanted to know THAT much about Bismarck, I would read a biography of him. The background history of battles, territorial squabbles and treaties likewise became too much to struggle through and I was still wondering, through all of this, what made the Empress Frederick "tick". Fritz was also given the short end of the deal; I wanted to know him as a person but turned the last page of the book without really finding out. Vicky's son Willy, the future Kaiser, fared a little better than his parents because Ms. Pakula zeroed in on him and made a successful effort to root out and explain the troubled formative years of this son who was eventually to bring disaster upon Germany. One fact that I found interesting was that Willy, as a young man, harbored an almost sexual love for his mother which finally turned to a bitter love-hate relationship. To sum up, this book was a huge undertaking on Ms. Pakula's part and I applaud her most sincerely for what is undoubtedly a masterwork, but I was left cold with regards to "knowing" the central characters of her work. The warmth and understanding were missing. It is one thing to roll off knowledge of historical dates and facts and quite another to bring long-dead individuals to life so that the reader knows them well and intimately like members of their own family, laughing with them, crying with them and, at the end, feeling better for having made their acquaintance. This is an art that was sadly lacking in this book; it had too much "head" and not enough "heart".

This book is an amazing mixture of biography, political history and peeks inside the royal houses of 19th century Europe. The story of Vickie is the premise of this detailed book but the author has made it so much more than that. "An Uncommon Woman" not only taught me about the tragic life of The Empress Frederick but also presented the story of the German people and creation of The German Empire in such a clear, concise and detailed manner that for the first time ever, German history actually makes sense to me.

Like many royal personages,Kaiserin Friedrich was multi-faceted and a mass of contradictions.Ms. Pakula guides us masterfully through this remarkable woman's life.The more one learns of her often difficult role as crown princess and later empress ,the more one admires her .This book provides excellent material for the history scholar and succeeds in being highly enjoyable-historian or not.

An Uncommon Woman is an excellent, first rate biography of Vicky, eldest daughter of Queen Victoria who, through marriage, became the Crown Princess of Prussia, and then Princess and later Empress Frederick of the German Empire. She played an influential (and one wishes a much more influential) role in German, and more broadly European, history during the latter 19th to early 20th centuries. Vicky strove to move German politics towards a more liberal, democratic, parliamentary form of government, but was successfully opposed by the autocracy of Chancellor Bismarck and even her son, who eventually became the Kaiser. The author persuasively implies that had this "uncommon woman" been able to prevail, European history may have benefited. The book succeeds as both an intimate, full-fledged account of this remarkable woman, her family members, and the many important historical persons of the times, as well as a comprehensive history of the creation of the German Empire, the rise of autocracy and militarism, and the lead-up to World War I. The writing style is excellent; the author is exceptionally skilled at presenting a thoroughly well-researched life of Vicky and detailed history of the times in a highly readable, well paced narrative. One of the most engaging and informative biographies I have read. Highly recommended.

This book could also have been titled "Bismark's Germany through the Empress Frederick's eyes". Out of the 700 pages of the book, 80% (at least) is related to Otto von Bismark's policies.

In fact it is a great book to learn about the victorian-georgian era history. BUT YOU MUST HAVE FULL KNOWLEDGE OF ENGLAND/VICTORIAN HISTORY to "grasp" the complete picture of this crucial era (1848-1914) regarding europeans conflicts and policies conductring to contemporary history.

The biography of the Empress herself could be said to be 1/3 of the book but you would not be aware of the intrigues and implications of the drama unfolded in this book without the other 2/3. It is a biography worth the price ... and the time spend to read it, because it is not simply a biography but a scholarly review of the german history from the unification of the little german principalities to the great german empire (mid 1800's) to the conflict openning the WWI.

Many rumors or falsified history-datas are corrected and you certainly do have a greater knowledge of all the conflicts of the XXth Century in Europe up to the conflict of Bosnia-Herzegovine , Tchechenia of the 1990's.

It's a very political oriented book but how can we do a ruler's biography without putting it in a wide sche of things especially in Europe in the second half of the XIXth Century.

This was a great biography that made you feel the happiness and sadnest moments in Empress Frederick's life time. Although I must admit there were moments in the book, particularly when Kaiser Frederick as well as the Empress herself were on their death beds, that made me want to box the ears of Kaiser Wihelm if he were still alive today!

The subject of this biography is the counterpoint from which one can view the development of the personalities and politics which molded the Germany of two world wars. But for chance, Victoria's husband Frederick William 3rd would have spread their liberal and constitutional views, and would have countered Bismarck's repressive policies which set the perfect stage for Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler. This interesting, carefully researched and documented, well-writen book adds an essential facet and perspective to the drama and misfortune of modern German history.