She was the youngest woman to be crowned Queen of England. She was the second queen to marry while ruling, and the first to have children while on the throne. She oversaw extraordinary changes in the country, as well as the establishment of the British Empire. She became Empress of India. By the time of her death, she had ruled longer than any monarch.

 With such a long reign, covering decades of world events, there’s no shortage of reading material about Victoria and her time. I’ve chosen a few of my favorite books about Queen Victoria. Of course, it’s not an exhaustive list, and it’s based on my preferences. So many of the books about Victoria seem to put Victoria into a box that limits her to her marriage and motherhood. That’s not surprising: with an overstated devotion to Prince Albert and a stunning number of children in the royal nursery, marriage and motherhood were the most obvious things about her. But the most obvious and public elements about our lives aren’t always the most important.

 I wanted to know other things about Victoria: as a young woman coming into power, as a new queen who made mistakes, as a working mother who had to balance her reality against expectations, as a daughter and a mother navigating complicated family relationships, as a woman who finally allowed herself to celebrate her accomplishments and broke into a big smile, belying the old adage, “We are not amused.”

So please join me to meet this extraordinary and complicated woman and explore some of my favorite books about the life and reign of Queen Victoria.

Victoria was fifth in line to the throne when she was born and was expected to move further away from the throne as she grew up. After all, her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, were expected to have a son. It was also possible the Duke of Kent’s older brothers might have a child that would take precedence. After Victoria’s father died, and as it seemed less and less likely other children were coming to the royal family to bump Victoria down the line of succession, the duchess began to prepare for the very real possibility that Victoria would one day be Queen of England.

Unfortunately, the duchess turned to the ambitious and controversial Sir John Conroy as her key advisor. Conroy saw Victoria’s place in the royal succession as a way to secure the Regency for himself. He convinced the duchess to establish a controlling educational regime for Victoria that was known as the “Kensington System.” This was designed to make Victoria utterly reliant on them. She was forbidden to be alone or spend time with other children. She was required to sleep in her mother’s room. She was forbidden to even walk down the stairs by herself without an older permission holding her hand.

Victoria later described her childhood as “very unhappy.” But even more problematic than her unhappiness was the lack of preparation for her role as Queen of England. She rebounded from her strict upbringing by reveling in her time alone, by eating whatever she wanted despite health concerns, and by making decisions based on personal resentments against her mother and Conroy rather than sound thinking, such as when she stumbled into a terrible blunder with Lady Flora Hastings

Throughout her reign, the nature of the monarchy and the power of the crown were changing. As the Empire expanded around the world and Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, her prime ministers were gaining power. She had complicated relationships with prime ministers, from an unpopular but very close relationship with Lord Melbourne and an appreciative relationship with the flattering Benjamin Disraeli to the difficult and sometimes unproductive relationships with Lord Russell and Lord Palmerstone.

The nature of the British monarchy came from a Medieval notion of the king’s (and in those days it was always a king) two bodies: a body natural that could be ill and weak and even die and a body politic that was destined by God to rule the country. This enabled the monarch’s power to pass immediately from the dead monarch to the heir. This is what held up the nation’s  “the king is dead, long live the king” approach to leadership. There had been queens who were married before, there was a queen who was a mother (Queen Anne). But Queen Anne came to the throne after her last child was born. 

There had never been a monarch before Victoria who was expected to have her body bear the heir to the throne while she was ruling the country. And the babies kept coming. She bore nine living children, all of whom survived. This was an extraordinary thing for the time, particularly for a women so small in stature and within just 17 years. And Victoria’s children went on to have plenty of children themselves. Victoria and Albert had strategically married their children to the royal families in Europe. Eventually, Victoria had 42 grandchildren spread among the royal families of Germany, Russia, Greece, Romania, Sweden, Norway, and Spain

From being the first monarch to live in Buckingham Palace to having more living children than anyone on the throne to reigning longer than any monarch before her (and every monarch after her until HM Queen Elizabeth II passed her in length of reign in 2015), Queen Victoria was truly a game-changer. 

And here are a few of some of the books that will help you get to know Queen Victoria.

The Life and Times of Victoria by Dorothy Marshall. This is a classic, published back in 1972. Lady Antonia Fraser, in her introduction, calls this take on Victoria’s life a “wise and perceptive study.” I find Lady Antonio Fraser’s books to be some of the absolutely best biographies on the planet, so that’s a comment I take seriously

This book includes a wonderful assessment of visuals, including reproductions of famous portraits we’ve seen, as well as images of newspaper pages, cartoons, photographs, and sketches. There are so many images that you don’t find more than two or three pages of text before you come across another picture. This makes the book very easy to read and helps readers look at the different ways people lived and worked and played in Victoria’s time

It offers a comprehensive overview of the Queen’s life, from her girlhood to her final days. Marshall’s tone and approach is straightforward and direct, providing a compelling narrative through the milestones of the queen’s life and reign. It’s a great resource. I have a wonderful older version, which I love. It has been reprinted; the most recent edition I could find was 1998.

Victoria the Queen by Julia Baird. This is a comprehensive and engaging look at the life of Queen Victoria that was published in 2016. The book includes several family charts and maps, as well as a description of all the key characters in the discussion. This terrific book is a deep dive into the life of a complicated woman who lived a full and long life.

One of the things this biography offers is a version of Victoria that doesn’t hold back her emotions. She loves Albert but resents having to share her power with him. She enjoys physical intimacy with Albert, but she doesn’t enjoy being pregnant. Or giving birth. Or having children. Rather portraying Queen Victoria as simply the staid, quiet “Widow of Windsor” that so many authors have done, Baird gives her a racy side, describing a scene between her and Brown that would make some readers blush. (No, I’m not sharing it—read it yourself!) Baird discovered this description, as well as other very personal information about the queen, from the diaries of Sir James Reid, Victoria’s doctor. Sir James had accidentally observed the playful scene between the queen and Brown and recorded it.

Baird offers something that other biographers do not. In addition to examining Queen Victoria’s own diaries, which unfortunately were so heavily edited by her family to eliminate any potentially controversial material, Baird looks at records such as Reid’s. In an interview about the book, Baird said she wanted to show more of Victoria’s true nature, the one not edited into propriety. In her words, “I wanted to see her as a flesh and blood woman.” 

Baird’s Victoria is extremely compelling and engaging. She is flawed but knows it, which makes her easier to cheer for. She had a sense of justice ahead of her time, hating racial and religious prejudice. She was brave in the face of real danger, surviving eight assassination attempts and continuing to be out in public right after them. Born in a time when the world was remaking itself, Queen Victoria became the most powerful queen and the most famous working mother in the world. She sought her independence in her own way, managing uneven relationships with family members, keeping the men working alongside her happy, recovering from childbirth and coping with what would probably be diagnosed now as post-partum depression, and fought for power at a time when woman had none. Baird paints a compelling and fresh picture of the remarkable queen.

Then there are two books that focus on the Victoria and Albert’s children and grandchildren: Victoria’s Daughters by Jerrold M. Packard and Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking: The Royal Marriages that Shaped Europe by Deborah Cadbury.

Packard includes a helpful “Principal Characters” section in Victoria’s Daughters so the reader can have a handy reference to keep track who marries whom and which children belong to which couple. It’s a stunning group that feels like a Who’s Who of late 19th and early 20th century Europe. Sharing bits of correspondence between the queen and her daughters allows readers to see them interacting as family members, seeking and giving advice, offering comfort, sharing stories.

Albert features prominently in the book. Too prominently. Packard states that it’s Albert who has the emotional relationship with all of his children, particularly his daughters. Packard’s Albert is innocent of ulterior motives when Victoria becomes pregnant repeatedly, while many modern authors see Albert as taking advantage of Victoria’s being the one to be pregnant with and then to bear the children as a way to gain power. In Packard’s version, Victoria asks for his help, and Albert comes to the rescue, immediately praise and appreciation by the queen’s (male) advisors. When Victoria gives birth to her ninth child, Packard describes as being accompanied “by the welcome relief of anesthesia,” as if that wipes away what it cost Victoria to suffer through nine pregnancies and births.

As you might have guessed, although I appreciate the idea of focusing on Victoria’s daughter and using bits of their correspondence to show their relationships, I don’t like the condescending way that Packard writes about these women. He describes Albert as “captaining the monarchy with the authority that the queen had abdicated to him,” which is at best a one-sided view of a complicated relationship and at worst a demeaning description that believes in a man’s natural superiority even though the man in question was a husband who kept his royal wife pregnant so he could take over her work, having none of his own. 

So, why include this book here? For one thing, it provides an excellent comparison to show why Baird’s portrait of Victoria is so much more relevant and powerful. And it does make an attempt to look at Victoria’s daughters in a focused way. These women lived at the heart of history: Vicky’s son Willy grew up to become Kaiser Wilhelm and Alice’s daughter Alexandra grew up to marry Nicholas II of Russia. Daughters of Victoria and mothers of the key figures in some of the most significant events of the twentieth century. It’s a great idea to focus on them. I think it’s just too bad Packard didn’t check his sexism at the door before he wrote the book.

Deborah Cadbury’s Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking, on the other hand, is a terrific exploration of the way that Victoria and Albert planned to use their children’s marriages to create a family dynasty that stretched across Europe. Queen Victoria continued on her own after Albert’s death, assertively arranging marriages for her 42 grandchildren. The goal was to yoke countries together through royal alliances, avoiding the wars of the Napoleonic age. 

The book takes readers through the most glamorous and decadent palaces and families of Russia and Europe. The main characters are family members and politicians at the same time, moving among scandals and relationships that would change the world. The greatest politician is the Queen herself, referred to as the grandmother of Europe. Perceived by some in her country as an elderly woman the world has left behind, in fact Victoria was attempting to manipulate and recreate the world. Seven of her grandchildren eventually became crowned rulers.

But of course, the plan failed spectacularly. The enormous shifts in worldwide politics was completely at odds with Victoria and Albert’s plan. The two of them envisioned Germany and Britain working together to shepherd Europe through trials and into a glorious future, strengthened by a family network that created unbreakable bonds. Even as we read the initial, early, naïve planning, we can’t help but think of the series of tragedies that followed.

Economic strife led to   uprisings and the overthrow of traditional centers of power. Revolution and war seethed just below the surface for years and eventually broke out, shattering Victoria’s matchmaking plans and eventually leaving Europe in ruins of war. The final pages take us into the fall of the Romanovs. Alexandra and her children huddle together against the shower of bullets that, at first, fail to kill them. Of course, eventually the family members were all dead, and when the corpses were examined, their assassins found a layer of “protection”—royal jewels sewn into their dresses. The women were trying to conceal the jewels for their flight out of Russia. It’s a powerful image of the trappings of royalty managing to delay but not prevent their deaths at the hands of political radicals

As powerful a queen as Victoria had been, she was unable to hold back the floods of change. Cadbury’s book plunges us into her attempt and its lasting failure.

So those are some of the books I find really helpful to get to know Queen Victoria. I’d love to hear your suggestions! Next week I’ll be sharing some of my favorite books about a really interesting group: the women of the Wars of the Roses.