Book description
'Your first duty is to God; your second to your Sovereign; your
third to yourself'.
During the sixty-odd years of her reign Queen Victoria gathered
around her a household dedicated to her service. For some, royal
service was the defining experience of their lives, for others it came
as an unwelcome duty, or a prelude to greater things. Serving Victoria
follows the lives of six members of her household from the governess
to the royal children, to her maid-of-honour, chaplain and personal physician.
Drawing on their letters and diaries - many hitherto unpublished -
Serving Victoria offers a unique insight into the Victorian
court, with all its frustrations and absurdities, as well as the Queen
herself, sitting squarely at its centre. Seen through the eyes of her
household as she traveled between Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral, and
to the French and Belgian courts, Victoria emerges as more vulnerable,
more emotional, more selfish, more comical than is generally supposed.
We see a woman who was prone to fits of giggles, who wept easily and
often, who gobbled her food and shrank from confrontation but insisted
on controlling the lives of those around her. We witness her
extraordinary and debilitating grief at the death of Albert, and her
sympathy towards the tragedies that afflicted her household.
Witty, astute and moving, Serving Victoria is a perfect foil
to the pomp and circumstance - and prudery and conservatism -
associated with Victoria's reign, and gives an unforgettable glimpse
of what it meant to serve the Queen.
After leaving Oxford University Kate Hubbard worked variously as a
researcher, a teacher, a book reviewer and a publisher's reader. She
currently works as a freelance editor. Her first book,
A Material
Girl: Bess of Hardwick 1527-1608
, was published in 2001, followed by two children's books - biographies
of Charlotte Bronte and Queen Victoria. Her most recent book,
Rubies
in the Snow
, is the fictionalised diary of Anastasia Romanov, youngest daughter of
Russia's last Tsar. Kate divides her time between London and Dorset.
