A fatherless girl grows up a virtual prisoner in the shabby backwater of Kensington Palace, despised by her royal relations, bullied and insulted by her foolish mother's evil genius. Only the core of stubbornness in her character sustains her as she waits for the day of deliverance - the day she will become Queen of England. She is Victoria; this is her story, recorded in her own words in the last troubled year of her life. With humanity and humour the Queen Empress of half the world looks back over eighty crowded years, remembering domestic crisis and public triumph, revolution, war and the fall of dynasties; remembering most of all the great and abiding love that illuminated every aspect of her life. In this, the autobiography Queen Victoria might have written, Cynthia Harrod-Eagles combines first-rate scholarship and brilliant story-telling to reveal the private woman behind the public mask.