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Chargement... Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (2012)par Anne Somerset
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. For all the history I try to read, my encounters with Queen Anne have been relatively rare - she's generally an afterthought, noted as the last Stuart monarch before the start of the Hanoverian dynasty, a character in someone else's story (such as a novel about Sarah Churchill I read a few years ago), or she comes up as a possible lesbian due to her relationships with female favorites. Overlooked seems to be the word to describe her, even during her own reign. Repeatedly, the author of this biography describes how the courtiers and advisors around Anne appeared to not think she had her own ideas, could come to her own conclusions, or make her own decision, despite evidence to the contrary. I had a lot of sympathy for Anne by the end of this biography, considering the politics she navigated, the personal tragedies she endured, and fracturing of so many of her personal relationships after she became queen. I usually try to make a point of finishing every book I start and try to give each one a chance. I made it about halfway through this one before concluding that life is too short to be reading long books you don't really care for. Even though Queen Anne is a relatively obscure figure, I had heard of her before because she promulgated one of the first copyright laws ever (the Statute of Queen Anne). So I started out interested and wanting to learn more about her life and times. Unfortunately, this book never really brought her to life for me, and I got especially bogged down in the tedious descriptions of the convoluted politics of the time. Don't get me wrong; I fully understand politics are important, especially when the subject is a queen, but I need to be more invested in the person before I can really dive into lengthy and detailed political accounts. To me the best kind of biography gives insights into who a person was and allows for an exploration of the times in which he or she lived, but I just couldn't get that from this one. I usually try to make a point of finishing every book I start and try to give each one a chance. I made it about halfway through this one before concluding that life is too short to be reading long books you don't really care for. Even though Queen Anne is a relatively obscure figure, I had heard of her before because she promulgated one of the first copyright laws ever (the Statute of Queen Anne). So I started out interested and wanting to learn more about her life and times. Unfortunately, this book never really brought her to life for me, and I got especially bogged down in the tedious descriptions of the convoluted politics of the time. Don't get me wrong; I fully understand politics are important, especially when the subject is a queen, but I need to be more invested in the person before I can really dive into lengthy and detailed political accounts. To me the best kind of biography gives insights into who a person was and allows for an exploration of the times in which he or she lived, but I just couldn't get that from this one. Without doubt a very thorough and scholarly work, but I found it hard going, especially towards the end. I felt the author relied too much on extensive quotations from letters and documents rather than attempting to create a flowing narrative, which is what the best biographers do. The characters didn't really come alive for me and there is very little sense of what life was like in Stuart England or the great flourishing in the arts that was taking place at the time. Even the melodramatic relationship between Anne and Sarah becomes tiresome after pages and pages of repetitive letters. I did learn a lot about Queen Anne however.
Somerset concentrates as much on Anne’s relationship with Sarah Churchill as she needs to in order to sell books to a reading public who hoard and sleep and feed and know not the patience to endure long stretches of Parliamentary infighting. But that infighting – the raw and squalling beginnings of the systematized partisan mania that would afflict every British government thereafter – is the truly fascinating part of Anne’s reign, especially since although she bemoaned the fanatics among both Whigs and Tories, she could scheme and thunder with the worst of them. Somerset may flirt with questions about the nature of Anne’s passionate attachment to Sarah, but she’s the first biographer since Trevelyan to do proper, intelligent justice to Anne the politician. Every page of Queen Anne is seamlessly good reading, but those pages are the best. Prix et récompensesDistinctions
Her personal life riven by passion, illness and intrigue, Queen Anne presided over some of the most momentous events in British history. Like Antonia Fraser's life of Marie Antoinette or Amanda Foreman's 'The Duchess', 'Queen Anne' is historical biography at its best. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)941.06History and Geography Europe British Isles Historical periods of British Isles 1603-1714, House of Stuart and Commonwealth periodsClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Anne was described by an elite Scottish man as having dirty wrappings on her legs Page?