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The Politics of Passion
by Anne Somerset
She ascended the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1702, at age thirty-seven, and five years later united two of her realms, England and Scotland, as a sovereign state, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. By the end of her comparatively short twelve-year reign, Britain had emerged as a great power - the succession of outstanding victories won by her general, John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough - had humbled France, and laid the foundations for Britain's future naval and colonial supremacy.
While the Queen's military was performing dazzling exploits on the continent, her own attention - indeed her realm - rested on a more intimate conflict: the female friendship, on which her happiness had for decades depended and which became for her a source of utter torment.
At the core of Anne Somerset's fascinating new biography, just published to acclaim in England ("Formidable" - Sunday Times, London; "Wonderfully pacy and absorbing" - Daily Mail), is a portrait of this fraught, complex bond between two very different women: Queen Anne, reserved, stolid, shrewd; and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, wife of the Queen's great general - beautiful, willful, outspoken, whose acerbic wit was equally matched by her fearsome temper.
The book tells the extraordinary drama of how Sarah goaded and provoked the Queen beyond endurance, and, after the withdrawal of Anne's favor, how her replacement, Sarah's cousin, the feline Abigail Masham, another lady-in-waiting, became the ubiquitous royal confidante and, Sarah publicly claimed to great scandal, the object of the Queen's sexual infatuation.
"A first-rate biography of a monarch worth contemplating." - Barnes and Noble
"Somerset (The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV, 2004) delivers an exhaustive and easily readable history of a queen trying to emulate Elizabeth I with none of the Tudor forcefulness and too much of the Stuart feebleness." - Kirkus
This information about Queen Anne was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Anne Somerset was born in London and graduated from King's College, London. She is the author of The Life and Times of King William IV, Ladies in Waiting, and Elizabeth I. She has worked as a research assistant for several historians, among them Antonia Fraser. Somerset, the daughter of the 11th Duke of Beaufort, lives in London.
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