November 22, 2016
“I do not like the name Alexandrina. From now on I wish to be known only by my second name, Victoria.”
Melbourne nodded. "Victoria."
Early one morning, less than a month after her eighteenth birthday, Alexandrina Victoria is roused from bed with the news that her uncle William IV has died and she is now Queen of England. The men who run the country have doubts about whether this sheltered young woman, who stands less than five feet tall, can rule the greatest nation in the world. Surely she must rely on her mother and her venal advisor, Sir John Conroy, or her uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, who are all too eager to relieve her of the burdens of power.
The young queen is no puppet, however. She has very definite ideas about the kind of queen she wants to be, and the first thing is to choose her name.
Everyone keeps saying she is destined to marry her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, but Victoria found him dull and priggish when they met three years ago. She is quite happy being queen with the help of her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, who may be old enough to be her father but is the first person to take her seriously.
Drawing on Victoria’s diaries, which she first started reading when she was a student at Cambridge University, 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 richly to life in this magnificent novel.
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Biography
Daisy Goodwin is a writer and television producer.After reading history at Cambridge, she went to Columbia Film School as a Harkness Fellow. After ten years at the BBC making arts documentaries, she left to join the independent sector and created a number of programmes including Grand Designs which is now in its 18th year on Channel 4.
In 2005 she started Silver River productions, which she sold to Sony in 2012. Alongside her tv work , Daisy has written a memoir, Silver River and two novels My Last Duchess Uk/The American Heiress US and The Fortune Hunter, which were both New York Times bestsellers. In 2014 Daisy decided to concentrate on writing full time and was commissioned to write her first screenplay, Victoria, an 8 part series about the early life of Queen Victoria for ITV and WGBH Masterpiece Theatre.
Victoria
Daisy is currently writing Series 2 of her hit show “Victoria” for ITV/PBS. In Series 1 – Victoria starts as the young Queen comes to the throne just after her eighteenth birthday and follows her through the stormy early years of her reign as she tries prove herself as a woman and a monarch. Victoria kept a diary from the age of twelve, and in the course of her lifetime wrote over 62 million words, so we have real access to her thoughts and feelings. This series will explore what it was like for an emotionally deprived teenager of diminutive stature to wake up one morning and find that she is the most powerful woman in the world.
VICTORIA is being produced by Mammoth Screen, the makers of Poldark; Victoria is being played by Jenna Coleman, Lord Melbourne by Rufus Sewell and Prince Albert by Tom Hughes.