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We Two, December 2009
Hardcover
Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals
Ballantine Books
December 2009
On Sale: November 30, 2009
480 pages
ISBN: 0345520017
EAN: 9780345520012
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
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. Now renowned chronicler 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 far more captivating, complex, 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, accomplished, and whiskered. “Albert is beautiful!”
Victoria wrote, and she proposed just three days later. As Gill reveals, Victoria and Albert entered their marriage
longing for intimate companionship, yet each was determined
to be the ruler. This dynamic would continue through the
years–each spouse, headstrong and impassioned, eager to lead
the marriage on his or her own terms. For two decades,
Victoria and Albert engaged in a very public contest for
dominance. Against all odds, the marriage succeeded, but it
was always a work in progress. And in the end, it was
Albert’s early death that set the Queen free to create the
myth of her marriage as a peaceful idyll and her husband as
Galahad, pure and perfect. As Gill shows, the marriage of Victoria and Albert was great
not because it was perfect but because it was passionate and
complicated. Wonderfully nuanced, surprising, often
acerbic–and informed by revealing excerpts from the pair’s
journals and letters–We Two is a revolutionary portrait of a
queen and her prince, a fascinating modern perspective on a
couple who have become a legend.
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