Victoria: The Queen by Julia Baird

Victoria: The Queen by Julia Baird

The true story for fans of the PBS Masterpiece series Victoria, this page-turning biography reveals the real woman behind the myth: a bold, glamorous, unbreakable queen--a Victoria for our times. Drawing on previously unpublished papers, this stunning new portrait is a story of love and heartbreak, of devotion and grief, of strength and resilience.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
JANET MASLIN, THE NEW YORK TIMES - ESQUIRE - THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY

Victoria the Queen, Julia Baird's exquisitely wrought and meticulously researched biography, brushes the dusty myth off this extraordinary monarch.--The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

When Victoria was born, in 1819, the world was a very different place. Revolution would threaten many of Europe's monarchies in the coming decades. In Britain, a generation of royals had indulged their whims at the public's expense, and republican sentiment was growing. The Industrial Revolution was transforming the landscape, and the British Empire was commanding ever larger tracts of the globe. In a world where women were often powerless, during a century roiling with change, Victoria went on to rule the most powerful country on earth with a decisive hand.

Fifth in line to the throne at the time of her birth, Victoria was an ordinary woman thrust into an extraordinary role. As a girl, she defied her mother's meddling and an adviser's bullying, forging an iron will of her own. As a teenage queen, she eagerly grasped the crown and relished the freedom it brought her. At twenty, she fell passionately in love with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, eventually giving birth to nine children. She loved sex and delighted in power. She was outspoken with her ministers, overstepping conventional boundaries and asserting her opinions. After the death of her adored Albert, she began a controversial, intimate relationship with her servant John Brown. She survived eight assassination attempts over the course of her lifetime. And as science, technology, and democracy were dramatically reshaping the world, Victoria was a symbol of steadfastness and security--queen of a quarter of the world's population at the height of the British Empire's reach.

Drawing on sources that include fresh revelations about Victoria's relationship with John Brown, Julia Baird brings vividly to life the fascinating story of a woman who struggled with so many of the things we do today: balancing work and family, raising children, navigating marital strife, losing parents, combating anxiety and self-doubt, finding an identity, searching for meaning.

Praise for Victoria: The Queen

Fascinating.--Vogue

In Baird's deft portrayal, Victoria lives, breathes, and struts before us in all her complexity. . . . On a geopolitical level, Baird's sweeping historical portrait also illuminates just how interconnected the European royal families were during this time. . . . Historical astuteness aside, the pages gallop along enhanced by titillating morsels of info.--Esquire

A vivid portrait of one of England's longest-reigning monarchs.--Entertainment Weekly

A] success from start to finish . . . Baird's] Victoria is a vivid, visceral creature.--The Christian Science Monitor

Like the best biographers, Baird writes like a novelist, and her book is crammed with irresistible detail and description.--The Seattle Times

Julia Baird's research interests centre around water. She agrees with the notion that water issues are ultimately issues of governance, and so her research focuses on human dimensions of water resources. Within this broad area, she is particularly interested in:

• building an understanding of how (and why) people engage in water management and governance, and how the qualities of these processes relate to social and ecological outcomes;
  
• how the concept of resilience relates to water governance, and how it is operationalized and applied in practice; and,
  
• applying the notion of social-ecological systems to agriculture, how these kinds of systems can be modeled, and how those models can be used to improve decision making about practices that influence water resources on agricultural landscapes.
  

Julia's research is situated within the field of sustainability science. She collaborates with researchers from diverse disciplines to pursue research questions. Her research is influenced by her many years on the family farm, her educational background in the natural sciences, and her keen interest in how people make decisions and take action to impact the sustainability of our water resources. She uses mixed methods - with a quantitative bent - and has a particular affinity for social network analysis. Her research tends to have both scholarly and applied outcomes.

Ryan Plummer's multi-faceted program of research broadly concerns the governance of social-ecological systems. In striving to advance knowledge of collaboration and adaptation within complex systems, he has focused on the exploring their theoretical underpinnings and ethical implications, modeling their processes, examining the roles of social capital, and investigating the influences of social learning. Water resources are the context in which his research mainly occurs and he is a Faculty Investigator in the Water Policy and Governance Group.

Findings from his research have been published in leading international journals such as Ecological Economics, Ecology and Society, Environmental Management, Frontiers in Ecology and Society, Global Environmental Change, Journal of Environmental Management, Society and Natural Resources and the UN journal, Natural Resources Forum. In addition, he is the author of Outdoor Recreation (Routledge, 2010), and co-editor of Adaptive Capacity and the Making of Environmental Governance (with D. Armitage, Springer, 2010) and Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems: the Role of Learning and Education (with M.E. Krasny and C. Lundholm, Routledge, 2011). He serves as a Subject Editor for Ecology and Society.

The scholarly quality of his research program was formally recognized in 2008 with the awarding of a Chancellor's Chair for Research Excellence. In 2004 he received the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences Award for Teaching Excellence and in 2008 he was selected as one of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) Excellence in Education Award winners for Promotion of Sustainable Practices.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781400069880
ISBN 10	1400069882
Title	Victoria: The Queen
Author	Julia Baird
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2016-11-22
Number of pages	752
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.