Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [87]
Interest in the young Queen blossomed into a more general interest in female royalty, and Agnes Strickland was there to feed the appetite. Over the next three decades, she and her sister Elizabeth produced biographies of thirty-three queens (including both consorts and female monarchs, and covering England, Scotland and France). The two women worked hard and companionably on both the writing and the extensive research for each volume. They trod new ground in historical writing. (Agnes suppressed the error-ridden biography of Victoria, and none of her subsequent books contained careless mistakes). Eliza and Agnes never relied on secondary sources. They unearthed papers that had lain mouldering in private collections, and in this way they shone a public spotlight on women whom contemporary male historians had ignored. They wrote about the past from the point of view of its spouses and victims, as well as its heroes. Thomas Babington Macaulay, a politician and author of the monumental five-volume History of England from the Accession of James II, “detested their methods,” according to Agnes’s biographer, Una Pope-Hennessy: “The emphasis was distressingly different from what he was accustomed to, for with the entry into the closet and the bedchamber, history was no longer a pompous march of massy events engineered by massive men, but a succession of intimate and homely details from which generalisations were gradually built up.”
The biographies made the Strickland name famous. However, only Agnes Strickland’s name appeared as the author of each book. Eliza, who actually wrote more than half the individual biographies, regarded popular acclaim as vulgar and was happy to let Agnes take all the credit. She had no interest in swanning through literary salons. The two women spent their mornings together, burrowing away in the British Museum Library or royal archives. In the afternoons, Eliza avoided all unnecessary calls and refused all invitations: instead, in her rented room in Bayswater, she read, wrote or visited with old acquaintances. Agnes, in contrast, revelled in her newfound status and acclaim. When in London, she always managed to secure an invitation to stay with smart friends in Regent’s Park or the West End. “The great gain [from the newly published third volume of the twelve-volume set The Queens of England] is that it has given me a grand place in society as well as literature,” she wrote to her Canadian sisters in 1841. “Since I last wrote I have been down to Windsor and had a long morning in the Royal Library….Yesterday I drank tea with Lady Bedingfield.” Agnes was the premier royal biographer of her age.
From now on, Agnes’s letters read like chapters from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. They were speckled with the names of minor aristocrats, junior politicians and the more literate members of the landed gentry. Agnes’s tall, mannish figure and deep voice were soon well known within the beau monde of Britain. One evening she sat next to the Duke of Wellington: “My early enthusiasm in favour of the hero of a hundred fights has not abated one chit. He was not near as deaf as I had heard.” She spent the summers writing at Reydon Hall, or as a guest in country houses. In 1846, a portrait of Agnes in the purple velvet dress she wore at court was hung in the Royal Academy. The artist, John Hayes, managed to soften the sitter’s imperious expression into something closer to a fashionably feminine simper. Further honours glimmered in the ether. “Our little queen,” as Agnes referred to Victoria