Emma VS

“Many people envied her position as the winner of the Baby Race and the wearer of the crown. But when she discovered she was to be queen, Victoria already knew that it was the breaking, not the making, of her life. 'I cried much,' she said. Her mother had prepared her for the lonely royal trap in which bother of their lives would be lived, a trap that tightly clasped so many Victorian women but which squeezed and nipped at a queen perhaps most damagingly of all. 'You cannot escape your own feelings,' Victoire told Victoria, all those years ago, 'you cannot escape ... from the situation you are born in'. You cannot escape. It was true. You cannot escape.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“The daily contents even of her bin 'would be more interesting than a year's file of The Times'.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“Even at rock bottom, when her doctors had thought she would go mad with grief, Victoria had spoken of endurance. She was 'determined', she wrote, that as a widow 'no one person, may he be ever so good ... is to lead, or guide, or dictate to me'.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE

“With Bertie's illness, Victoria's return to her best self, the self she had lost in Albert, had begun.”
― Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria: The authoritative biography of Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by beloved historian Lucy Worsley OBE