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By Root 954 0

brilliance of this account lies at least in part in its artful use of free indirect discourse, in which the thoughts and even the speech of characters are communicated to the reader in a reportorial mode, so that it remains unclear whether the sentiments are those of the narrator or of the first-person subject. The term derives from the French style indirect libre, and one of its pioneering practitioners in France was Flaubert. The effect of this style—a style expertly employed in English by writers like Woolf and Joyce—is to produce ironic disjunction and implicit commentary at the same time that it offers an opportunity for narrative identification with fictional or historical characters. Strachey’s delicately ironic empathy with the prince consort, like Woolf’s empathy with the dog Flush, slides into and out of Albert’s consciousness while always tethering itself to verifiable details. A prefatory note, appearing opposite the dedication page (“To Virginia Woolf”), informs the reader that “Authority for every important statement of fact in the following pages will be found in the footnotes. The full titles of the works to which reference is made are given in the Bibliography at the end of the volume.” A footnote to this passage cites three pages from the Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, Lady Lyttelton.

Strachey’s descriptions and impressions are not speculations, as is often the case in twenty-first-century biography (the subject “might” have thought such-and-such, or he “could” have thought; or, cloaked in the form of a rhetorical question, “Did” he think, or “Might he have” thought …). Instead, Strachey draws his dialogue directly from letters and other written accounts. To give some sense of how he does this, I want to quote briefly from these letters. You will see both how close he is to the source, inventing no detail, and how the conversion from a third-person account to free indirect discourse brings the subject (as we so easily say) “to life.”

Here, then, is an excerpt from Lady Lyttelton’s letter to the Hon. Caroline Lyttelton, Windsor Castle, October 9, 1840:

Yesterday evening, as I was sitting here comfortably after the drive, reading M. Guizot, suddenly there arose from the rooms beneath oh such sounds! It was Prince Albert—dear Prince Albert—playing on the organ, and with such master skill as it appeared to me, modulating so learnedly, winding through every kind of bass and chord, till he wound up into the most perfect cadence and then off again, louder and softer … I ventured at dinner to ask him what I had heard. “Oh, my organ!—a new possession of mine. I am so fond of the organ! It is the first of instruments—the only for expressing one’s feelings—and it teaches to plan—for on the organ, a mistake! Oh, such a misery!” and he quite shuddered at the thought of the sostenudo discord …57

And there is this, from a letter five years later, September 22, 1845, reporting that Lady Lyttelton had, in “a fit of courage,” spoken frankly to the queen and prince about how Victoria was perceived on a recent trip abroad:

The Prince advised her (on her saying, like a good child, “What am I to do another time?”) to behave like an opera-dancer after a pirouette, and always show all her teeth in a fixed smile. Of course, he accompanied the advice with an immense pirouette and prodigious grin of his own, such as few people could perform after dinner without being sick, ending on one foot and t’other in the air …58

And finally, from a letter yet another five years later (July 22, 1850), which finds Lady Lyttelton once again musing on her reading, this time from the royal residence at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, when she is interrupted by the sound of Albert at the organ:

—Last evening such a sunset! I was sitting gazing at it and thinking of Lady Charlotte Proby’s verses, when from an open window below this floor began suddenly to sound the Prince’s orgue expressif, played by his masterly hand. Such a modulation, minor and solemn, and ever changing, and never ceasing, from a piano like Jenny Lind’s holding note,