Queen Victoria

Front Cover
Harcourt, Brace, 1921 - Biography & Autobiography - 434 pages

"This enchanting volume is not a history of the Victorian age but the portraiture of a woman... Strachey's work is pure art...a narrative as fresh and distinctive as some delicious perfume." -David Muzzey, Political Science Quarterly, (1922)


Queen Victoria (1921) is the classic biography of Britain's greatest monarch by Lytton Strachey. Victoria (1819-1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837 until her death. In addition, she was Empress of India beginning in 1876.


With her reign of 63 years, she gave her name to an era, the Victorian age. This was a period of expansion of the British Empire, and industrial, scientific, political, cultural, and military change.


Queen Victoria was awarded the "James Tait Black Memorial Prize," one of Britain's oldest literary awards.

 

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 346 - You have heard me called a flatterer," he said to Matthew Arnold, "and it is true. Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.
Page 192 - So much I feel my genial spirits droop, My hopes all flat, nature within me seems In all her functions weary of herself ; My race of glory run, and race of shame, And I shall shortly be with them that rest.
Page 121 - I was calm but very decided, and I think you would have been pleased to see my composure and great firmness ; the Queen of England will not submit to such trickery. Keep yourself in readiness, for you may soon be wanted.
Page 84 - Wise wretch ! with pleasures too refined to please ; With too much spirit to be e'er at ease; With too much quickness ever to be taught; With too much thinking to have common thought: You purchase pain with all that joy can give, And die of nothing but a rage to live.
Page 69 - At 9 came Lord Melbourne, whom I saw in my room, and of course quite alone, as I shall always do all my Ministers. He kissed my hand, and I then acquainted him that it had long been my intention to retain him and the rest of the present Ministry at the head of affairs, and that it could not be in better hands than his.
Page 419 - From my heart I thank my beloved people. May God bless them!
Page 424 - ... to the spring woods at Osborne, so full of primroses for Lord Beaconsfield — to Lord Palmerston's queer clothes and high demeanour, and Albert's face under the green lamp, and Albert's first stag at Balmoral, and Albert in his blue and silver uniform, and the Baron coming in through a doorway, and Lord M. dreaming at Windsor with the rooks cawing in the elm-trees...
Page 409 - The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Woman's Rights,' with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.
Page 68 - Since it has pleased Providence to place me in this station, I shall do my utmost to fulfill my duty towards my country; I am very young, and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced; but I am sure that very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.
Page 278 - Berlin] not to entertain the possibility of such a question as the Princess Royal's marriage taking place at Berlin. The Queen never could consent to it, both for public and private reasons, and the assumption of its being too much for a Prince Royal of Prussia to come over to marry the Princess Royal of Great Britain in England is too absurd, to say the least.

References to this book

About the author (1921)

LYTTON STRACHEY (1880-1932), was an English biographer and critic, whose greatest achievements were in biography. After studying at Cambridge, he lived in London where he became a founding member of the Bloomsbury Group. Among his books are: Eminent Victorians (1918) and Elizabeth and Essex (1928).