Written By: Gillian Gill
Publisher: Random House (Audio)
From the Press ReleaseBook Description:
It was the most influential marriage of the nineteenth century-and one of history's most enduring love stories. Traditional biographies tell us that Queen Victoria inherited the throne as a naïve teenager, when the British Empire was at the height of its power, and seemed doomed to find failure as a monarch and misery as a woman until she married her German cousin Albert and accepted him as her lord and master. Gillian Gill turns this familiar story on its head, revealing a strong, feisty queen and a brilliant, fragile prince working together to build a family based on support, trust, and fidelity, qualities neither had seen much of as children. The love affair that emerges is more captivating and relevant than that depicted in any previous account.
The epic relationship began poorly. The cousins first met as teenagers for a few brief, awkward, chaperoned weeks in 1836. At seventeen, charming rather than beautiful, Victoria already "showed signs of wanting her own way." Albert, the boy who had been groomed for her since birth, was chubby, self-absorbed, and showed no interest in girls, let alone this princess. So when they met again in 1839 as queen and presumed prince-consort-to-be, neither had particularly high hopes. But the queen was delighted to discover a grown man, refined and accomplished. "Albert is beautiful!" Victoria wrote, and she proposed just three days later.
As Gill shows, the marriage of Victoria and Albert was great not because it was perfect but because it was passionate and complicated.
We Two is a revolutionary portrait of a queen and her prince, a fascinating modern perspective on a couple who have become a legend.
About the author:Gillian Gill, who holds a PhD in modern French literature from Cambridge University, has taught at Northeastern, Wellesley, Yale, and Harvard. She is the author of
Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale,
Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries, and
Mary Baker Eddy. She lives in suburban Boston.
Quentin Blake is a well-known artist whose work has made him popular on both sides of the Atlantic. He has illustrated most of Roald Dahl’s children’s books as well as many others. He lives in London, where he teaches illustration at the Royal College of Art.
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