Book Spotlight: Victoria by Daisy Goodwin

Title: Victoria 
Author: Daisy Goodwin
Publisher: St. Martin's 
Publication Date: November 22, 2016
ISBN: 9781250045461
Number of Pages: 352
Goodreads Description:
“They think I am still a little girl who is not capable of being a Queen.”
Lord Melbourne turned to look at Victoria. “They are mistaken. I have not known you long, but I observe in you a natural dignity that cannot be learnt. To me, ma’am, you are every inch a Queen.”
In 1837, less than a month after her eighteenth birthday, Alexandrina Victoria – sheltered, small in stature, and female – became Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Many thought it was preposterous: Alexandrina — Drina to her family — had always been tightly controlled by her mother and her household, and was surely too unprepossessing to hold the throne. Yet from the moment William IV died, the young Queen startled everyone: abandoning her hated first name in favor of Victoria; insisting, for the first time in her life, on sleeping in a room apart from her mother; resolute about meeting with her ministers alone.
One of those ministers, Lord Melbourne, became Victoria’s private secretary. Perhaps he might have become more than that, except everyone argued she was destined to marry her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. But Victoria had met Albert as a child and found him stiff and critical: surely the last man she would want for a husband….
Drawing on Victoria’s diaries as well as her own brilliant gifts for history and drama, Daisy Goodwin, author of the bestselling novels The American Heiress and The Fortune Hunter as well as creator and writer of the new PBS/Masterpiece drama Victoria, brings the young queen even more richly to life in this magnificent novel.

Publicist's Insight: 
Goodwin, author of the acclaimed novels The American Heiress and The Fortune Hunter, was inspired to write Victoria after picking up a volume of the monarch’s diaries. “How handsome Albert looks in his white cashmere breeches,” teenage Queen Victoria wrote, “with nothing on underneath.” People often think of the queen as an aging, frumpy widow in black, but Goodwin was intrigued by the young woman she found in the dairies: a feisty personality, but also steadfast in her ideas and beliefs about being a ruler. In this magnificent novel, Daisy—also creator and writer of the upcoming PBS/Masterpiece drama Victoria—shares the brilliantly imagined life of a young woman about to make her mark on her country…and the world.

Check out a look at the Victoria drama series airing on Masterpiece on PBS here and check out my review of Daisy Goodwin's previous release, The Fortune Hunter, here!