Queen Victoria as a black-clad sourpuss?
Not on your life.
Queen Victoria as a black-clad sourpuss?
Credit: Courtesy of ITV for MASTERPIECE
Not on your life.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: When did you first get interested in Queen Victoria?
One of the assignments was to read her diaries.
Victoria was 19, like me, and she’d just gotten engaged to Prince Albert.
When I read that, I whooped out loud.
That taste of her early life seems to have really struck a chord.
Fast-forward a few decades, and I’d made Victoria a character in my novel The Fortune Hunter.
I started it and realized that it could be a screenplay.
I’ve been reading Victoria’s diaries online, and it seems like you drew very heavily from them.
It’s in the diary.
In fact, people have said there are things on the show that couldn’t be real.
But my scriptsand my novelare based on deep knowledge of the real woman.
I read her diaries looking not just for facts but for mood, for intention, for nuance.
I was also inspired by my own daughter, who’s 15 and very strong-willed.
What would that be like for me?"
Victoria was so young when she was crownedonly 18.
And everyone wanted a piece of hereveryone.
She really wasn’t allowed to have any kind of independent life.
A lesser woman might have been broken by that, but Victoria, clearly, just bided her time.
So she asserted herself from the very beginning?
And that’s really quite remarkable.
You have to remember what a patriarchal society it wasand she just was not having any of it.
But Victoria refused to be molded or manipulated by anyone.
She chose her own destiny.
