In the original dust jacket. Red cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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For conditions, please view the photographs. [430]  “Vicky, daughter and namesake of Queen Victoria, seemed like a princess of golden promise. As Princess Royal of Great Britain, she married the young and dashing Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia. Shocked by the strictness of the Prussian court and the wretched condition of the poor, Vicky was determined to bring enlightenment and democracy to Germany. Gloriously in love, the royal couple prepared for the day Frederick would ascend the throne, with Vicky as his Queen. Then fate intervened, in the sinister form of Count Otto von Bismarck-and Vicky’s golden promise turned to heartbreak and tragedy”.

Review: This sympathetic biography of the Princess Royal was written almost forty years ago. It is masterful, warm and intimate, a balanced and interesting account of the ordeals of the Princess Royal who was sent by her parents Queen Victoria and Prince Albert into the lion’s den of the Prussian court when she married Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm. A seventeen year old bride, Vicky had to cope with hostile in-laws, living quarters so decrepit the tapestries were rotting on the walls and the carpets eaten by mice, with court intrigues and jealousies.

In a life filled with tragedy and buffeted by circumstances over which she had no control, Vicky has almost been buried by the bulldozer of history. History remembers her son, Kaiser II, and her famous royal parents and her antagonist Bismarck, while Vicky has been plowed under. But this courageous woman is coming into her own as a person whose high ideals and total integrity personify all that is good about the human spirit. In the end she triumphs, because she never gives in or gives up. The death of her beloved husband, Fritz, who ruled as Friedrich III for only three months before dying of throat cancer, renders Vicky persona non grata in the Prussian court as Kaiser Wilhelm II seeks to expunge the memory of his own father and makes every effort to push his mother into oblivion. Her memory is almost extinguished as World War I rages, a conflict which luckily she never lived to see or the role her own son played in it.

After all these years, Vicky is coming into her own and people are looking at her and re-valuating her as an island of integrity in the midst of chaos, a woman who believed in freedom and justice and equality. Little Vicky, five feet two or so, a dynamo in a small package, and with a will of iron, will not be forgotten because of the likes of this fine book. A great read, and highly recommended.