Serving Victoria, Kate Hubbard
Serving Victoria, Kate Hubbard
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Serving Victoria
Life in the Royal Household

Author: Kate Hubbard

Narrator: Kate Hubbard

Unabridged: 14 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/27/2020


Synopsis

During her sixty-three-year reign, Queen Victoria gathered around herself a household dedicated to her service. For some, royal employment was the defining experience of their lives; for others it came as an unwelcome duty or as a prelude to greater things. Serving Victoria follows the lives of six members of her household, from the governess to the royal children, from her maid of honor to her chaplain and her 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Drawing on their letters and diaries—many hitherto unpublished—Serving Victoria offers a unique insight into the Victorian court, with all its frustrations and absurdities, as well as the Queen herself, sitting squarely at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 center. Seen through the eyes of her household as she traveled among Windsor, Osborne, and Balmoral, and to the French and Belgian courts, Victoria emerges as more vulnerable, more emotional, more selfish, more comical, than the austere figure depicted in her famous portraits. 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 her husband, Albert, and her sympathy toward the tragedies that afflicted her household.


About Kate Hubbard

Kate Hubbard is the author of the acclaimed historical biography Serving Victoria. After leaving Oxford University, she worked variously as a researcher, a teacher, a book reviewer and a publisher's reader and a freelance editor. Kate works for the Royal Literary Fund and lives in London and Dorset.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Alice

Interesting idea, but not what I thought it would be based on the reviews or cover flap. There was more gossip and fluf than real, new, information. I was hoping for more about what the servant ladies actually DID. Why were they necessary at court? What did they actually do to earn their salaries? W......more

To a certain degree, Queen Victoria's reign cannot be compared to any other in British history, except perhaps that of Elizabeth I. Victoria utterly defined her age, not just as a convenient label for a period in time, but as a symbol, an institution, an enduring pillar of British life. It was under......more