Queen Victoria's Buckingham Palace

by Amanda Foreman, Lucy Peter

Published to mark the bicentennial of Queen Victoria’s birth, Fit for a Queen tells the story of how Queen Victoria transformed Buckingham Palace from a lavish bachelor pad to an iconic symbol of the monarchy, a rallying point for the nation, and a cherished family home.

This delightful gift book accompanies the annual summer exhibition at Buckingham Palace and features many objects and paintings that illustrate how Queen Victoria came to the throne, the ceremony of her Coronation, and how she turned Buckingham Palace into a symbol of national solidarity. A charming and captivating book that offers fascinating insight into one of Britain’s most famous and influential monarchs, Fit for a Queen takes readers on a tour through Victoria’s palace home to show how it came to be a residence of Queens.
 

122 pages, Hardcover

Published September 15, 2019

About the author

Amanda Foreman is the author of the award-winning best seller, "Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire", and A World on Fire: A Epic History of Two Nations Divided. She lives in New York with her husband and five children.

She is the daughter of Carl Foreman, the Oscar-winning screen writer of many film classics including, The Bridge on the River Kwai, High Noon, and The Guns of Navarone.

She was born in London, brought up in Los Angeles, and educated in England. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University in New York. She received her doctorate in Eighteenth-Century British History from Oxford University in 1998.

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire was a number one best seller in England, and best seller for many weeks in the United States. It has been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Hungarian, Romanian, Croatian, Turkish, Korean and Mandarin Chinese. The book was nominated for several awards and won the Whitbread Prize for Best Biography in 1999. It has inspired a television documentary, a radio play starting Dame Judi Dench; and a movie, titled The Duchess, staring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes.

In addition to regularly writing and reviewing for newspapers and magazines, Amanda Foreman has also served on a number of juries including The Orange Prize, the Guardian First Book Prize and the National Book Awards. She is currently serving as a judge for the Dan David Prize, the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, and the Man Booker Prize.

Her history of British volunteers in the American Civil War, A World on Fire was published in 2010.

Reviews

[XJ Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant book on the life of Queen Victoria and how she transformed the Buckingham Palace to be the centre of the Monarchy as it is today. It also traces the history of how the British Monarchy changed during Victoria’s reign. With the Buckingham Palace fulfilling its new roles as serving private, public, and state purposes, the Monarchy also transformed itself from a rather remote institution to a more accessible one, with charitable activities as its main focus. The book also shows how Victoria and Albert enjoyed themselves with all the banquets and other events in the palace, demonstrating a pleasant atmosphere during the early Victorian era. In addition, the image of the Royal Family as a proper, middle-class ‘family’ is shown to the nation as an example of Victorian virtues. This was also achieved through the various portraits and pictures taken in the palace, which included the children and sometimes the wider family of Victoria.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the life of Queen Victoria and her family or the history of Buckingham Palace.

[00100100 00100100 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely book to accompany the exhibition. Great illustrations and interesting facts.