Review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian
'…Towards the end of this subtle, thoughtful biography of Queen Victoria AN Wilson presents his defining argument. Victoria, he suggests, was an artist. He isn't talking here about her rather good watercolours, but something more profound. The queen, he claims, lived an entirely inward life, filled with characters and narratives of her own making: saintly Albert, bad Bertie, twinkly Disraeli and the wicked, wicked Boers. Just like that other epic storyteller Marcel Proust, Victoria stayed home (although, unlike the Frenchman, she never allowed herself to lie in bed) and conjured up a world that unfurled over the decades as larger-than-life characters bloomed, hovered and faded, leaving behind their own particular perfume…'
Review by Philip Hoare in New Statesman
'…In the strange, gated chambers of Osborne House, her overgrown holiday bungalow on the Isle of Wight, the presence of Queen Victoria lingers like the smell of boiled cabbage in an institution. Preserved in this Italianate moment in time, Victoria and Albert remain a glossy, sexy, celebrity power couple, the Winterhalter epitome of mid-century certitude. But dark shadows lurk in the corridors, “strange gusts of cold in the atmosphere”, which, as A N Wilson discerns, began to blow even as that reign reached its peak; a foreboding of the grief that redefined it. “The 19th-century Cult of Death,” Wilson writes, “had no more operatic votary than Queen Victoria.” Indeed, in his elegant and sometimes Gothic retelling of her life, nothing is more striking than his evocation of Victoria, in the immediate post-Albert years, as a mentally ill woman…'