An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick - Softcover

Pakula, Hannah

4.18

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9781857998535: An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857998537 ISBN 13: 9781857998535

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1997

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Drawing on a vast amount of original family documents, including more than 7,000 letters between the Empress and the Queen, Pakula offers an absorbing portrait of a brilliant, determined woman. Vicky, as she was known to her family and friends, was trained by her father, Prince Albert, in the principles of constitutional monarchy and parliamentary government. Sent to Germany with the mission of carrying these liberal concepts back to the land of Albert's birth, the seventeen-year-old encountered the rigidities of a hidebound Prussian court and the "blood and iron" policies of Otto von Bismarck. Vicky's major ally in spreading enlightened liberalism was her husband, the handsome Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, heir to the Prussian and German thrones. A fine general who did not believe in war, Fritz, as he was known, adored Vicky. But their eldest son, the man who would become Kaiser Wilhelm II, turned against his parents, allying himself with the militarism his ultraconservative grandfather and the anti-British foreign policy of Bismarck. Mounting the throne after the untimely death of his father, the young Kaiser abandoned his mother and went on to wage a ruinous war against her beloved England.

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About the Author:

Hannah Pakula is the author of The Last Empress, which was a New York Times notable book, The Last Romantic, which was called by Graham Greene the best biography and one of the three best books of the year, and An Uncommon Woman, which was a Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist. She lives in New York City.

From Booklist:

Pakula, author of the brilliant biography of Queen Marie of Romania, The Last Romantic (1985), proffers a definitive biography of a historical figure well deserving of such a monumental treatment. Her new subject possessed impeccable credentials in the scheme of nineteenth-century European royalty: Princess Royal of Britain, then crown princess of Prussia, and finally German empress. Vicky, as she was called in the family, was the eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and was also easily the cleverest of their vast brood. Her idealistic father arranged her marriage to the heir of the Prussian throne to spread liberal ideas to that reactionary country. The marriage went off as planned, and Vicky loved her handsome prince, Fritz, and he vice versa; they quickly grew to be partners in liberalism. But Vicky was never able to truly shake the foundations of the conservative Prussian monarchy, mainly because of Reich chancellor Prince Bismarck, her nemesis, but also because her husband was too ill and reigned too briefly (88 days) to make real changes. Adding injury to insult, her son, the Kaiser Bill we fought in World War I, reversed the little good Vicky had done in bringing notions of constitutionalism to an autocratic regime by trying to pretend his mother had never existed! Pakula plunges the reader deeply into European politics, but the water is not only fine, it is exhilarating. Brad Hooper

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