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Queen Victoria's Secrets, by Adrienne Munich; pp. xx + 254. New Your: Columbia University Press, 1996, $27.95.
Even today, we scarcely know what to do with Victoria: attitudes to her oscillate between awe and iconoclasm, just as they did when she was alive. The cover of Queen Victoria's Secrets, like the book itself, deftly balances these extremes. In a cartoon published in 1897, the Diamond Jubilee year, the Queen is perched staunchly but precariously on a pillar at the edge of a pier. She is not dressed regally, but in the familiar bonnet and shawl; she wields an umbrella against the elements. Her tiny feet dangle over the edge; around her is the open sea. Simultaneously ruling the waves and about to fall into them, this is the Queen whom Adrienne Munich teasingly celebrates: she is ridiculous, even surreal, but she somehow stays on top.
Munich's funny, extravagant, thoroughly original account of Victoria's varied and changing public incarnations fractures the doughty little Queen in order to restore her power, not as monarch or role model, but as canny media manipulator. Perched somewhere between biography and cultural history, Queen Victoria's Secrets is organized loosely around Victoria's life cycle-like a standard Life, it begins with the young Queen, moves through the wife, the widow, the dowager who appeared to be a whirlwind of maternal power, to the corpse, suddenly little again-but its emphasis is thematic: assuming we have already read a standard biography, Munich turns to Victoria's dogs, her servants, her...