The world’s worst-dressed woman

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

  • Queen Victoria’s Secrets by Adrienne Munich
    Columbia, 264 pp, £22.00, June 1996, ISBN 0 231 10480 4

When Lytton Strachey looked back at the ‘apotheosis’ of Queen Victoria’s final years in his biography of 1921, he could only wonder at the disparity between the ‘dazzled imagination of her subjects’ and the unimaginative woman who had somehow inspired them. While ‘Victoria soared aloft towards the regions of divinity through a nimbus of purest glory,’ as Strachey put it, no one appeared to realise how inadequate she was to her symbolic task:

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