You keep using the word "progressive." I... do not think it means what you think it means.

[epershand]

The terrible-amazing-terrible tell-all biography of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother I've been nibbling away at for the last month or so has just outdone itself.

Yet Edward VIII's beliefs and style were far more in keeping with those of our age. Had he been given a fair chance, the British Empire might not have gone into the terminal decline it did as soon as his brother succeeded him. For the fact is, King George VI oversaw the immediate and precipitate decline of the British Empire's fortunes. He oversaw the beginning of the dismantling of the Empire, which continued under his daughter, and might well have been averted had a more progressive king been on the throne. And a progressive king with an American queen might well have been just the antidote to much of the the antipathy which saw nationalists like Gandhi and Jinnah prevail.

- Lady Colin Campbell. The Queen Mother: The Untold Story of Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, Who Became Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. p 356, Nook edition.

(Every time people ask me the title of the book I'm reading, I'm like "uh, something involving the words 'Elizabeth' and 'Queen Mother' repeated a lot of times? I can't remember the order?" If it were up to me the title would be A Very Catty History of the Twentieth Century, By A Determined Partisan of Edward VIII.)

I am just enjoying this book SO MUCH, in, ironically, very much the same way I enjoyed the V&A museum. I'm so used to the historical accounts I read, however biased they are, spend a lot of time appearing to be neutral and objective. It's oddly refreshing to see something so coldly pleased with its own biases that it wears them on its sleeve.

(I'm also in the middle of listening to the audio books of Jo Walton's Small Change Trilogy, which I last read a few years go. I am really excited that I got to the Abdication Crisis in this book right as I got to the Edward VIII bits of Half a Crown. But ACCORDING TO LADY COLIN CAMPBELL that whole "Nazi sympathies" thing was just a nasty rumor Elizabeth started. *nodnod*)

Comments

[wrabbit]

That sounds entertaining. Is she really saying that India and Pakistan would not have been partitioned (or made independent?) had Edward been king?

[epershand]

She REALLY IS. This book is ridiculous and also amazing.

[starlady]

Ahahahahaha oh my god what an idiot.

[epershand]

Other things Lady Colin Campbell is Very Concerned about include: how much smaller the city homes of the very rich are these days than they were a hundred years ago.

[wordweaverlynn]

The shame of the cities!

[eccentric_hat]

Well, first, this is hilarious and amazing, obviously. In addition, I'm really confused why an Edward VIII partisan would decide to write a Queen Mother biography. Has she already written her Edward VIII book? Did the Queen Mother strike her as a more popular subject? Or is this the kind of tell-all that delights in being on the opposite side of things from the book's subject?

I'm slowly working my way through a book that dates the start of the empire's decline to Yorktown, and describes the empire as self-consciously moribund all the way through the nineteenth century. Which, frankly, strikes me as the more interesting story.

[epershand]

I think it's the last of your options--it very much delights in being about all the negative things "you didn't know about" about a popular figure. The author's primary claim to fame seems to have been a nasty tell-all biography of Princess Diana.

But her primary source of information was her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Argyll, who was a close personal friend of the Duke of Windsor, so there's that influence too.

The one thing that this book does *really well* is coverall the overall arc of royals as a group of people in Europe over the course of the twentieth century revolutions and world wars. It's simultaneously humanizing (there's a story about how Queen Mary was still resentful of a childhood rivalry with her cousin Alix, which meant that when Alix and her husband Tsar Nicholas needed asylum, she didn't grant it to them, with... well-known results) and alienating.

A standard view of twentieth century history mostly has royals wandering vaguely in the background having only minor influences on things. This account turns family squabbles into the stuff of countrybuilding, and simultaneously points out the impact the broader world had on the family. It's a really interesting story, just... not the most significant or even focused lens available for the larger subject.

[eccentric_hat]

That does sound interesting! Twentieth-century monarchy really is such an interesting beast. Did you know, at one point after World War I, Finland actually invited a German prince (one of Victoria's grandsons-in-law, if I recall correctly) to be their king. They were all excited about being independent from Russia and there were still enough monarchists around who thought the best way to declare and secure their nationhood was with a king. I'm not entirely clear on what happened at that point, but politics intervened and they ended up with a republic instead. But still--imagine wanting to set up a new monarchy in 1918!

AKRRkbHNaOAIAOH

[(Anonymous)]

Thinnkig like that is really impressive