Me and My Princess
Writing a novel about someone is an intimate encounter. Even if that person died 100 years ago. Even if that person occupied an exalted position, the like of which you’ll never know. Even if you’re compelled to take liberties, guessing what that person was thinking or feeling or desiring at various moments.
I was attracted to Princess Victoria, Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, because her predicament aroused me—my ire, my pity, my interest. Once I spent long periods in her company, I fell in love. And now I hope that by telling her story, in fiction, other people will come to love her, too.
While I’m very close to the princess, we’ve not met, since we occupy different worlds. In fall 2017 I was working as a magazine editor and executive at the US company, Time Inc. when—poof—my job and my company vanished. I might have scrambled into a lifeboat, and found safe harbor at a job at a successor firm, but, in truth, the collapse of the print advertising business had hollowed out magazines. I worried who I would be when I was no longer a publishing bigwig, yet the time had come, after 30 years in journalism, to try something else.
I’ve always loved fiction, and I’ve always been interested in history, especially of England where my mother grew up, and of Germany, where I lived briefly as a teenager. On the Bicentennial, July 4, 1976, I was at the US army base in Sogel West Germany, a moment when World War II still lurked just around the corner in people’s memories. Why had civilized Germany descended into barbarism? I studied modern European history at college in part to understand that. And decades later I was still pondering.
So I took these interests, and the severance checks I received for a year, and decided to write a novel. For my maiden effort, I wasn’t confident I could pull off a vivid re-imagining of the past—like Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See or EL Doctorow’s Ragtime—where the main characters are entirely fictional. More comfortable for me was writing about a real person as Hilary Mantel does in Wolf Hall and Gore Vidal in Lincoln. But whom to choose? Who would intrigue both me and a wide audience? And while I obsessed over the rise of the Nazis, so much historical fiction is about World War II. Could I go further back in time and dramatize the seeds of later tragedy? These vague notions in mind, I stumbled upon Vicky.
Princess Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa, to use her full name, was Queen Victoria’s first child—born in November 1840 a scant nine and half months after the Queen’s marriage to her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. As the baby was being delivered the disappointed doctor called out, “Tsk, Ma’am it’s a princess.” The queen replied, “Not to worry, the next will be a prince.” And, indeed, Vicky’s brother, Albert Edward, called Bertie, was born a year later. From the very start, Vicky occupied a peculiar position in her family, acknowledged as the brightest and the most capable of the royal couple’s nine children, and yet tipped to be shipped abroad, married off to a foreign prince, no chance to inherit the throne that her mother occupied.
I, too, am the eldest in my family with a brother only a year younger. I could imagine how painful it would be, relegated to second best when you were firstborn just because you were a lesser—a girl. So that’s how it began with me and Vicky: I identified with her. And then there was Vicky’s royal status. During my years in the magazine business, I’d seen how only the Pope dying or famous movie stars splitting moved more magazines than the British royal family doing anything at all. While Vicky’s predicament spoke to me, I committed to her was because I thought she would sell.
Also, I could work the Nazis into Vicky’s story. Vicky took part in the birth of the German nation, in 1871, because the prince chosen to be her husband was a German, Prince Frederick of Prussia, called Fritz. And it was the Prussians, led by the crafty Prussian aristocrat Otto von Bismarck, who finally united the thirty-plus German states into a single country. Bismarck called his method “blood and iron,” and ever after bellicosity characterized the German Empire, right into the twentieth century. And we all know how that turned out.
So I embarked on my life with Vicky feeling kindly disposed to her—sort of like an arranged marriage, it made sense. Then I started reading her letters and encountered a vulnerable yet determined girl, who matured into a valiant woman, stumbling often and suffering much but remaining true to her desire to be good and do good. I got that itchy, excited feeling I always got when I was a reporter, landing a juicy interview. Vicky’s letters were stupendous copy: her youthful idealism, her rhapsodic descriptions of her romance with Fritz, her humorous quips about the dreadful Berlin court, her raging against the lies that Bismarck told and the fate he brought down upon her family, and millions of other Germans. Vicky wrote these letters, more than four thousand of them, to her mother back in Britain from the time she left home as a 17-year-old bride in January 1858 until Queen Victoria’s death in January 1901.
With Vicky’s own words to provide the emotional backbone of the story, I got on with writing. A year passed and I felt smug. We were a killer combination—me and my princess. After I had a 100,00 word-long draft, I decided I’d sharpen it a bit before submitting to publishers. I signed up for a writing class at the 92nd Street Y with the novelist Sandra Newman. I handed in the first three chapters. I thought my classmates were sure to love it all, with a few reservations naturally. But I would learn from their small suggestions and finish off the book.
Imagine my shock when they said it didn’t work. A few people liked Vicky, but most of the class considered my novel boring or, worse, derivative. “I’ve watched the Crown,” said one woman with a dismissive flick of her hand, “there’s nothing new here.” The teacher summed it up in the most constructive way: “This is journalism, Clare, not fiction.”
So I took Vicky home, my tail between my legs.
Several weeks of anger, denial, and sadness followed‚—a mini-grief response, the death of my dream of writing a novel. I wasn’t sure how to go forward, or if I wanted to go forward, and I hated that I had squandered my year’s severance and gotten exactly nowhere. My employer-sponsored health insurance due to run out, I went for a mammogram for the first time in three years.
I was lying in a darkened exam room, stripped to the waist, when the radiologist pressed the ultra-sound paddle down hard on my gel-covered right nipple and, looking into her glowing blue screen, announced I had breast cancer. One minute I was floating in the warm sea of normality and the next I was rolled by an ice-cold breaker I never saw coming.
Of course, my indisputable diagnosis was not so unusual. Millions of other women before me have been told the same—including Vicky. Before she died of breast cancer, it migrated to her bones and she screamed in pain at all hours so much so that her servants stuffed their ears with cotton wool to keep out the sounds of her agony.
The best doctors in Europe in 1901, Vicky’s 61st year, could do nothing to stop a disease discovered as a lump in her right breast. But the fine physicians at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering dispatched my lump without fuss two days after Christmas, 2018. I spent a mere six hours at the hospital. A 9-mm tumor in a post-menopausal woman without family history of breast cancer? Nothing to get upset about, the surgeon pronounced.
But I did get upset. My cancer combined with everything else—my evident failure as a fiction writer, the irretrievability of my corporate career, the descent into Alzheimer’s of my dignified mother, the simultaneous diagnosis of cancer in a handful of other friends and family members, turned me gloomy and morbid. Worse, I felt hard done by. How could it be that I was no longer a golden child, impervious to cruel fate?
Ha! Sorrow stalks us all.
So what to do with this completely commonplace revelation I came to aged 57? Trudging to the library one day at the end of January, it occurred to me that I was a wimp. Was I going to give up on Vicky because my first attempt to bring her alive fell flat? Was I too proud to say that I had a lot to learn? Did I really lack the will to continue? I still believed in the story, and I still thought about Vicky all the time—lyrics I heard in songs, and news items I read in the paper reminded me of her. I missed her. And I felt a renewed sympathy for her, living in the past where midlife cancer was a death sentence.
When I resolved to start again with Vicky, I turned back to Sandra Newman. I asked her to read the whole manuscript and tell me what could be salvaged. She bested the cancer docs for bedside manner. She was soothing even when she delivered her verdict: there’s not much here. But she agreed the trajectory of the novel had potential. It was a matter of a completely new approach. “Get in her head and stay there,” she advised.
I fretted over authenticity. How could I ever imagine, accurately, what it was like to be a princess, and then a German Empress, and then a bereft widow, living in a huge castle, despised by one’s son? Yes, Vicky’s letters help, but in the end all fiction is a leap of empathy. I chose to write about a real person but I couldn’t skip invention. I was scared the way I was when I jumped into the deep end of a swimming pool for the first time. My “life-jacket”—careful, close reliance on facts that had girded my writing heretofore was gone. I had to take all I knew about this woman I adored, and dare to envision how she would feel, and what she would say and do. I had to go below the surface of her—below even the version of her life she presented to her mother in private letters.
It took five months. After I handed the rewritten novel to my agent it took her two weeks to sell it. Several publishers said no, but one said yes, and one is all you need.
Now Vicky is venturing out in the world, in my novel A MOST ENGLISH PRINCESS. Not everyone will like her, I’m sure, nor was she ever completely likeable. Opinionated, admonitory, and starchy like her mother, she rubbed plenty of people the wrong way. She was smart, but not so smart she didn’t get the wrong end of the stick sometimes. The royal families in Britain and in Germany were a snippy lot, rivalrous and resentful, and Vicky was in the thick of some ugly incidents. But in general, she tried to be the best wife, mother and public servant she could be. Even weighed down with grief, she fought back against bitterness and recommitted to her duty. In free moments she pursued her passion for painting. And she was dauntless about saying aloud what she knew was going wrong in Germany—even when it cost her.
I am confident now that others, too, will come to love Vicky, and I present her with the pride one feels for a cherished friend, mixed with gratitude for all that she taught me.
I was attracted to Princess Victoria, Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, because her predicament aroused me—my ire, my pity, my interest. Once I spent long periods in her company, I fell in love. And now I hope that by telling her story, in fiction, other people will come to love her, too.
While I’m very close to the princess, we’ve not met, since we occupy different worlds. In fall 2017 I was working as a magazine editor and executive at the US company, Time Inc. when—poof—my job and my company vanished. I might have scrambled into a lifeboat, and found safe harbor at a job at a successor firm, but, in truth, the collapse of the print advertising business had hollowed out magazines. I worried who I would be when I was no longer a publishing bigwig, yet the time had come, after 30 years in journalism, to try something else.
I’ve always loved fiction, and I’ve always been interested in history, especially of England where my mother grew up, and of Germany, where I lived briefly as a teenager. On the Bicentennial, July 4, 1976, I was at the US army base in Sogel West Germany, a moment when World War II still lurked just around the corner in people’s memories. Why had civilized Germany descended into barbarism? I studied modern European history at college in part to understand that. And decades later I was still pondering.
So I took these interests, and the severance checks I received for a year, and decided to write a novel. For my maiden effort, I wasn’t confident I could pull off a vivid re-imagining of the past—like Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See or EL Doctorow’s Ragtime—where the main characters are entirely fictional. More comfortable for me was writing about a real person as Hilary Mantel does in Wolf Hall and Gore Vidal in Lincoln. But whom to choose? Who would intrigue both me and a wide audience? And while I obsessed over the rise of the Nazis, so much historical fiction is about World War II. Could I go further back in time and dramatize the seeds of later tragedy? These vague notions in mind, I stumbled upon Vicky.
Princess Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa, to use her full name, was Queen Victoria’s first child—born in November 1840 a scant nine and half months after the Queen’s marriage to her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. As the baby was being delivered the disappointed doctor called out, “Tsk, Ma’am it’s a princess.” The queen replied, “Not to worry, the next will be a prince.” And, indeed, Vicky’s brother, Albert Edward, called Bertie, was born a year later. From the very start, Vicky occupied a peculiar position in her family, acknowledged as the brightest and the most capable of the royal couple’s nine children, and yet tipped to be shipped abroad, married off to a foreign prince, no chance to inherit the throne that her mother occupied.
I, too, am the eldest in my family with a brother only a year younger. I could imagine how painful it would be, relegated to second best when you were firstborn just because you were a lesser—a girl. So that’s how it began with me and Vicky: I identified with her. And then there was Vicky’s royal status. During my years in the magazine business, I’d seen how only the Pope dying or famous movie stars splitting moved more magazines than the British royal family doing anything at all. While Vicky’s predicament spoke to me, I committed to her was because I thought she would sell.
Also, I could work the Nazis into Vicky’s story. Vicky took part in the birth of the German nation, in 1871, because the prince chosen to be her husband was a German, Prince Frederick of Prussia, called Fritz. And it was the Prussians, led by the crafty Prussian aristocrat Otto von Bismarck, who finally united the thirty-plus German states into a single country. Bismarck called his method “blood and iron,” and ever after bellicosity characterized the German Empire, right into the twentieth century. And we all know how that turned out.
So I embarked on my life with Vicky feeling kindly disposed to her—sort of like an arranged marriage, it made sense. Then I started reading her letters and encountered a vulnerable yet determined girl, who matured into a valiant woman, stumbling often and suffering much but remaining true to her desire to be good and do good. I got that itchy, excited feeling I always got when I was a reporter, landing a juicy interview. Vicky’s letters were stupendous copy: her youthful idealism, her rhapsodic descriptions of her romance with Fritz, her humorous quips about the dreadful Berlin court, her raging against the lies that Bismarck told and the fate he brought down upon her family, and millions of other Germans. Vicky wrote these letters, more than four thousand of them, to her mother back in Britain from the time she left home as a 17-year-old bride in January 1858 until Queen Victoria’s death in January 1901.
With Vicky’s own words to provide the emotional backbone of the story, I got on with writing. A year passed and I felt smug. We were a killer combination—me and my princess. After I had a 100,00 word-long draft, I decided I’d sharpen it a bit before submitting to publishers. I signed up for a writing class at the 92nd Street Y with the novelist Sandra Newman. I handed in the first three chapters. I thought my classmates were sure to love it all, with a few reservations naturally. But I would learn from their small suggestions and finish off the book.
Imagine my shock when they said it didn’t work. A few people liked Vicky, but most of the class considered my novel boring or, worse, derivative. “I’ve watched the Crown,” said one woman with a dismissive flick of her hand, “there’s nothing new here.” The teacher summed it up in the most constructive way: “This is journalism, Clare, not fiction.”
So I took Vicky home, my tail between my legs.
Several weeks of anger, denial, and sadness followed‚—a mini-grief response, the death of my dream of writing a novel. I wasn’t sure how to go forward, or if I wanted to go forward, and I hated that I had squandered my year’s severance and gotten exactly nowhere. My employer-sponsored health insurance due to run out, I went for a mammogram for the first time in three years.
I was lying in a darkened exam room, stripped to the waist, when the radiologist pressed the ultra-sound paddle down hard on my gel-covered right nipple and, looking into her glowing blue screen, announced I had breast cancer. One minute I was floating in the warm sea of normality and the next I was rolled by an ice-cold breaker I never saw coming.
Of course, my indisputable diagnosis was not so unusual. Millions of other women before me have been told the same—including Vicky. Before she died of breast cancer, it migrated to her bones and she screamed in pain at all hours so much so that her servants stuffed their ears with cotton wool to keep out the sounds of her agony.
The best doctors in Europe in 1901, Vicky’s 61st year, could do nothing to stop a disease discovered as a lump in her right breast. But the fine physicians at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering dispatched my lump without fuss two days after Christmas, 2018. I spent a mere six hours at the hospital. A 9-mm tumor in a post-menopausal woman without family history of breast cancer? Nothing to get upset about, the surgeon pronounced.
But I did get upset. My cancer combined with everything else—my evident failure as a fiction writer, the irretrievability of my corporate career, the descent into Alzheimer’s of my dignified mother, the simultaneous diagnosis of cancer in a handful of other friends and family members, turned me gloomy and morbid. Worse, I felt hard done by. How could it be that I was no longer a golden child, impervious to cruel fate?
Ha! Sorrow stalks us all.
So what to do with this completely commonplace revelation I came to aged 57? Trudging to the library one day at the end of January, it occurred to me that I was a wimp. Was I going to give up on Vicky because my first attempt to bring her alive fell flat? Was I too proud to say that I had a lot to learn? Did I really lack the will to continue? I still believed in the story, and I still thought about Vicky all the time—lyrics I heard in songs, and news items I read in the paper reminded me of her. I missed her. And I felt a renewed sympathy for her, living in the past where midlife cancer was a death sentence.
When I resolved to start again with Vicky, I turned back to Sandra Newman. I asked her to read the whole manuscript and tell me what could be salvaged. She bested the cancer docs for bedside manner. She was soothing even when she delivered her verdict: there’s not much here. But she agreed the trajectory of the novel had potential. It was a matter of a completely new approach. “Get in her head and stay there,” she advised.
I fretted over authenticity. How could I ever imagine, accurately, what it was like to be a princess, and then a German Empress, and then a bereft widow, living in a huge castle, despised by one’s son? Yes, Vicky’s letters help, but in the end all fiction is a leap of empathy. I chose to write about a real person but I couldn’t skip invention. I was scared the way I was when I jumped into the deep end of a swimming pool for the first time. My “life-jacket”—careful, close reliance on facts that had girded my writing heretofore was gone. I had to take all I knew about this woman I adored, and dare to envision how she would feel, and what she would say and do. I had to go below the surface of her—below even the version of her life she presented to her mother in private letters.
It took five months. After I handed the rewritten novel to my agent it took her two weeks to sell it. Several publishers said no, but one said yes, and one is all you need.
Now Vicky is venturing out in the world, in my novel A MOST ENGLISH PRINCESS. Not everyone will like her, I’m sure, nor was she ever completely likeable. Opinionated, admonitory, and starchy like her mother, she rubbed plenty of people the wrong way. She was smart, but not so smart she didn’t get the wrong end of the stick sometimes. The royal families in Britain and in Germany were a snippy lot, rivalrous and resentful, and Vicky was in the thick of some ugly incidents. But in general, she tried to be the best wife, mother and public servant she could be. Even weighed down with grief, she fought back against bitterness and recommitted to her duty. In free moments she pursued her passion for painting. And she was dauntless about saying aloud what she knew was going wrong in Germany—even when it cost her.
I am confident now that others, too, will come to love Vicky, and I present her with the pride one feels for a cherished friend, mixed with gratitude for all that she taught me.
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