I picked this book up for two reasons. One is that having read a great deal
of the literature from the Victorian period in British history, I have never
read anything about the actual monarch who lent her name to it. The other is
that I spent an entire summer reading the diaries of Virginia Woolf once and
Lytton Strachey figures prominently in the Bloomsbury group she was part of.
His writing piqued my curiosity.

This is a nice little précis of the life of Victoria. It dwells on the
personal side of her life and touches on the political less than I could
have wished but all in all I found it enlightening. He also brings to the
front the importance of Albert in British foreign policy and suggests that
had he not died just on the eve of the American Civil War, the British
policy towards the war may have been significantly different. His emphasis
on the personal loneliness of Albert, an intellectual man married to a
non-intellectual woman who adores him was also new to me. I had never given much
thought to Albert as more than the man Victoria mourned for over half her
life.

The book read well also. I was surprised at that since my take on the whole
Bloomsbury group is that they were well above the general level of rest of
us and wrote for themselves and Art as an abstract rather than for general
consumption. To find a little gem like this was a treat. Now I have to go
find a biography of Strachey to find out more about him than Virginia
Woolf’s sometimes catty observations in her diary.