Victoria: The Queen by Julia Baird - Random House (2016)
Whether we acknowledge it or not, most of us prefer leaders who somehow manage to rise above the trivial concerns with which we ourselves struggle. We want our artists and writers to be passionate and unpredictable, but tend to lose respect for politicians who put their hearts on display. The best politicians are those who never have sex and never get angry. Nothing cools political enthusiasm so quickly as definitive proof that those in charge are—shockingly—just as red-blooded and hot-headed as the rest of us. Collectively, we imitate the single lady who rejects every suitor who doesn’t live up to her sanitized Prince Charming standards (or the wistful young man whose dreams occur in the quaint stage-set of Stepford, Connecticut). She will remain single, and we will remain politically stymied. The amount of pressure we heap upon the shoulders of our representatives is unfair and unproductive. Different as their platforms may be, the one thing that all presidents, prime ministers, and royal families have in common is their biological status as human beings. The heart cannot be cut from the equation, and rather than persecute these individuals for the sins we know too well, we should perhaps cultivate a certain degree of empathy. (in case this introduction should be misconstrued, I am defending natural expressions of emotion NOT excusing derogatory remarks or blatant sexual assault).
Despite having ruled for sixty-three years and seven months; despite the fact that her influence was great enough to be immortalized as an eponymous era; despite the role she played in both The Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the British realm from a damp little Island on the periphery of continental Europe to one of the most expansive empires in history—Queen Victoria is remembered by many as a melodramatic, mopey woman. She is scoffed at by historians because of her shameless expressions of grief following the death of her beloved husband, Albert. What these historians might consider to be the greatest virtues of a vulnerable, helpless woman, prove to be unattractive in one who wielded incredible power. In her masterful biography, Victoria: The Queen, Julia Baird focuses on precisely the same attributes other biographers have used to damn the diminutive queen. Baird distinguishes herself, however, because she chooses to celebrate Victoria’s obvious humanity—every one of her ‘unseemly’ emotions—rather than cite these flashes of feeling as evidence that women are inherently unsuited for positions in government. Baird’s biography is a celebration of feminine passion and perseverance, arguing that these attributes actually elevate Victoria above her male counterparts. It is also a book containing lessons that are highly relevant to the political situation in which we presently find ourselves.
Julia Baird is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia. She is known for her contributions to The Sydney Morning Herald, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Guardian, and Harper’s Bazaar. She makes frequent appearances on television and radio shows in Australia, and hosts The Drum on ABCTV. In addition to Victoria: The Queen, Baird is also the author of Media Tarts, a book which utilizes a series of in-depth interviews to examine the roles female politicians play in Australia. Baird has long evinced an interest in women who are interested in politics. She profiled both Sarah Palin and Rachel Maddow for Newsweek, and wrote her Ph.D. on the relationship between female politicians and the press. Julia Baird’s interests and experience as a journalist make her the ideal candidate to expose the degree to which Queen Victoria has been unfairly attacked due to her gender. One of the most admirable qualities of Baird’s writing is that she refuses to justify Victoria’s reactions or apologize for her emotions. Baird doesn’t feel the need to reduce Victoria to the inhuman level of her frigid male contemporaries. Victoria deserves our admiration precisely because she allowed her heart to participate in her rule. In the introduction to her book, Baird clarifies the challenges she faced while writing about Victoria:
When she was crowned, people were amazed that Victoria could think clearly and speak without stumbling; when she married, they were convinced she had deferred all major decisions to Albert; and when he died, she was castigated as a remote, grieving widow. All this is wrong. Queen Victoria was a decisive ruler who complained of the weight of her work while simultaneously bossing prime ministers about daily, if not hourly…Yet our generation, almost as much as the Victorian, seems to fail to understand how such a woman could wield power ably and with relish. Part of the reason for this failure is the sheer difficulty of digging through the mass of legend and hyperbole to reach the real Victoria.
Ruling women must spend an incredible amount of time balancing the scales of power. It is a lose-lose situation and an inexcusable waste of time and energy. If they invest themselves too much in politics, their ‘feminine ways’ are blamed for any and every failure of policy. If they disappear into the domestic sphere and focus their energies on birthing a dynasty, they are seen as the spineless instruments of dubious husbands and ministers. Women in power are objects of suspicion. Women who relinquish power are nonentities. A queen who is publicly affectionate with her children is too unfocused to rule. A queen who ignores her children is biologically deficient. Queen Victoria struggled all her life to manage her reputation as a mother, wife and sovereign, because it was unthinkable that anyone could manage all three roles at once. She is still burdened with these prejudices today. As Baird suggests,
Victoria was the most powerful queen, and the most famous working mother, on the planet. When we allow her to remain—as she has done in public memory for so long—submerged in her black piles of mourning, we forget that Victoria had been fighting for her independence, her prestige, and the honor of the Crown since she was a teenager, and did so successfully and in large part alone. We also forget that she fought for an empire and values she believed in and worked until her eyes wore out, that she advised, and argued with, ten prime ministers, populated the royal courts of Europe, and kept the British monarchy stable during the political upheavals that shook Europe in the nineteenth century. We forget that she loved again, that she giggled when grandchildren played at her feet, that she helped avoid a war with the United States, that she leapt upon opportunities to fire or anoint prime ministers. We forget that suffrage expansion and antipoverty and antislavery movements in the British Empire can all be traced to her monumental reign, along with a profound rethinking of family life and the rise of religious doubt.
If that resume isn’t impressive enough for you, Baird encourages readers to take a step back and consider Victoria’s rule from a wider perspective:
The queen was born at a time of immense upheaval—the sleepy village that surrounded Kensington Palace would become a bustling metropolis by the end of her lifetime, with chimneys billowing smoke that clouded the sun, row houses crammed with five families per room, rivers clogged with sewage, and ships proudly sailing across the world to plant British flags on foreign continents. Uprisings would rattle the Church, the aristocracy, and Parliament. Under her reign, Britain would achieve a greatness it had not known before This queen would rule a quarter of the people on earth, an epoch would be named after her, and her stern profile would forever be associated with a paradoxical time of growth, might, exploitation, poverty, and democracy.
Throughout Victoria: The Queen, Julia Baird zooms in and out, jumping from a cozy domestic scene, to one in which Victoria’s international reach is evident. This structural balance makes for a thoroughly enjoyable read in which Victoria is allowed to shine as both a queen and a woman. Too often her biographers elevate one position at the expense of the other. Baird’s deliberate shifting between micro and macro, public and domestic, is a refreshing argument against the myth that women have to choose. Queen Victoria is proof that a woman can be both a ruler and a human being—that strong emotions might actually improve one’s ability to govern. Baird says it best in the concluding paragraph of her introduction:
Victoria grappled with many of the matters women do today—managing uneven relationships, placating resentful spouses, trying to raise decent children, battling bouts of insecurity and depression, spending years recovering from childbirth, yearning for a lost love, sinking into the strength of another when we want to hide from the world, longing to make independent decisions about our own lives and to shape the world we live in. She lusted after and fought for power at a time when women had none. Victoria’s story is one of unmatched prestige and immense privilege, of defiance and crumbling, of meddling and mettle, of devotion and overwhelming grief and then, finally, a powerful resilience that defined the tiny woman at the heart of an empire. It is, above all, a surprising story of strength. What we have truly forgotten today is that Victoria is the woman under whose auspices the modern world was made.
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