Queen Victoria's Secrets

New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 9780231104807. Hardback. First Edition. First Printing. Fine/Fine. Like new. 0231104804. DW is not price-clipped. pp. xxi,+ 254. 9 x 6 x 0. With numerous illustrations in black & white from contemporary paintings and engravings. A fine hardback copy in fine unclipped and intact wrapper. Usual superior American binding. No annotations or inscriptions. Like new. Exploring the influence of Victoria on England's cultural history, this book adopts many different approaches to explore the various incarnations of the queen in the minds of her people. Topics covered centre on those of importance to Victorian women and include fashion, marriage and menopause. "An unconventional fugure in an age that excluded women from government, Victoria was accorded prominence unavailable to any male monarch. Yet as Adrienne Munich argues in this fascinating work, the originality of the solid, dour icon that was Victoria lay, paradoxically, in her very ordinariness. The first book to fully investigate the influence of this icon of British history, [the book] demonstrates the firm grasp the queen held on the cultural imagination of her country, exploring how Victoria created and maintained her royal authority. Gracefully weaving together feminist, anthropological, and post-colonial approaches, Munich searches out the myriad, often contradictory incarnations of the queen in the minds of her people. How did Victoria convincingly maintain her power for forty years after Prince Albert's death, never giving up her identity as a grieving widow? How did Victorian society's reverential treatment of their queen conflate with the monarch's plain, middle-class public image? These are some of the secrets Munich examines in her richly detailed work. Moving away from the traditional chronological approach of biography, [the book] views these enigmas in terms of the predominating concepts governing a Victorian woman's life, from fashion to marriage to menopause. In a lively discussion of pornography, Munich points out a chain of masochistic fantasies associated with Victoria, whose very name has long been a shorthand for sexual repression. Munich reassesses the queen's presence in the canonical texts of the day - Dickens, Tennyson, and Gilbert and Sullivan, to name just a few - but also draws heavily upon popular productions, from street ballads to pornographic literature. More than fifty enchanting illustrations, including high and low culture depictions of the queen and her coterie, enliven Munich's often witty, always provocative text. In demonstrating the subtle but powerful ways in which Victoria performed significant cultural work, [the book] goes against the grain of Victorian scholarship, which has tended to overlook the queen's political and cultural centrality. This stylish, accessible portrait will be of great interest to those who are fascinated by the myth-making and secrets of the Victorian age." - from this inside front and rear jacket flaps "The secrets of Queen Victoria's power and presence involve - among other things - her clothes, her dogs, her tears, her weight, her amorousness, and her domesticity. Investigating the cultural meanings of such apparently trivial facts, Adrienne Munich draws on an intricate texture of visual and verbal data to construct her innovative, revealing interpretation of a queen whose symbolic importance has never before been fully interrogated. Full of surprises large and small, [the book] provides delight, provocation, wisdom, and abundant solid information." - Patricia Meyer Spacks, University of Virginia. This is a work of considerable scholarship with detailed chronology, books cited, notes, and index. .