Victoria and Albert, Allies in Love
By Martin Rubin, Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2009
We Two
By Gillian Gill
Ballantine, 460 pages, $35
Queen Victoria (1819-1901) is known to Americans perhaps more than any other British monarch in part because her name characterizes an ethos or outlook that is oddly critical to America’s own cultural self-definition. “Victorian,” the biographer Gillian Gill writes, is an “intensely affective word, since it relates to things closest to all of us, to the way we run our sex lives and organize our families.” . . .
In “We Two,” Ms. Gill makes it clear that the creation of the Victorian spirit, however one defines it, was very much a joint enterprise. Victoria and her husband, Albert—the German-born “prince consort,” as his royal position was known—were famously devoted to each other . . . . But their marriage, Ms. Gill claims, was not a real-life fairy tale of doting and pretty ceremony; it was “a work in progress, not a fait accompli, a drama not a pageant.” Ms. Gill pores over letters and diary entries to confirm that many of the traits we associate with the word “Victorian” would have been impossible without Albert’s partnership. . . .
For Martin’s full review, click here or visit www.wsj.com.