Contemporary Authors

• Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians Scribe (Melbourne, Australia), 2004
• Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire Random House (New York, NY), 2016

1. Victoria The Queen : An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire LCCN 2015025297 Type of material Book Personal name Baird, Julia (Julia Woodlands), author. Main title Victoria The Queen : An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire / Julia Baird. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Random House, [2016] Description xlvii, 696 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 25 cm ISBN 9781400069880 CALL NUMBER DA554 .B18 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Media tarts : how the Australian press frames female politicians LCCN 2005362364 Type of material Book Personal name Baird, Julia (Julia Woodlands) Main title Media tarts : how the Australian press frames female politicians / Julia Baird. Published/Created Melbourne : Scribe, 2004. Description vi, 330 p. : 24 cm. ISBN 1920769234 Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0634/2005362364-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0634/2005362364-d.html CALL NUMBER HQ1236.5.A8 B35 2004 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Wikipedia -

  Julia Baird (journalist)
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Julia Baird
  Born Julia Woodlands Baird
  1967 (age 49–50)
  Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
  Education University of Sydney
  Occupation Journalist
  Years active 1998–present
  Children 2
  Parent(s) Bruce Baird
  Relatives Mike Baird (brother)

  Julia Woodlands Baird (born 1967) is an Australian political journalist, television commentator and writer from Sydney.

  Contents

  1 Early life and education
  2 Career
  3 Personal life
  4 Bibliography
  5 References
  6 External links

  Early life and education

  Baird was born in Sydney, the middle child of politician Bruce Baird and his wife Judith (nee Woodlands). Her older brother, Michael was the Premier of New South Wales. The family lived in Rye, New York in the 1970s while her father was Australian Trade Commissioner.[1][2] After they returned to Australia in 1980, Baird attended Ravenswood School for Girls.

  Baird was awarded a Ph.D in history from the University of Sydney in 2001. Her thesis was on women in politics.[3] In 2005, she was a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University researching the globalisation of American opinion in the lead up to the Iraq war.[2][4][4]
  Career

  Baird started her journalistic career with The Sydney Morning Herald in 1998.[3] By 2000, she was editor of the Opinion pages.[5] She was a campaigner for women in the Sydney diocese of the Anglican church.[6] She also worked as a religious commentator for Triple J and as a freelancer for ABC Radio.[4] Her first book, Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians was published in 2004.[4]

  In 2006, Baird became deputy editor at Newsweek in New York City, working there until it ceased print publication in 2012.[3] She also wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer.[5] She has written extensively about gender and politics, covering for example misogyny in Australian politics[7] and transgender soldiers in the American military.[8] More recently she has written about Donald Trump's political strategy.[9] Baird has also written about religious topics.[10]

  In 2010, Baird signed a contract with Random House to write a biography of Queen Victoria.[3] She returned to Australia and hosts the The Drum, a current affairs television show.[6][11]
  Personal life

  Baird has two children.[5] In 2015, she revealed in a New York Times column that she was recovering from surgery for ovarian cancer.[12] In a press conference on 19 January 2017, her brother revealed that her cancer has recurred.[13]
  Bibliography
  Baird, Juila (2004). Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians. Sydney: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd. ISBN 1920769234.
  Baird, Julia (2016). Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire. Random House. ISBN 978-1400069880.

• Julia Baird Home Page - http://www.juliabaird.me/

  “You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.” –Colette.

  Julia Baird is a journalist, broadcaster and author based in Sydney, Australia. She hosts The Drum on ABCTV and writes columns for the Sydney Morning Herald and the International New York Times. Her writing has appeared in a range of publications including Newsweek, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Guardian, the Good Weekend, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald, The Monthly and Harper’s Bazaar. Her biography of Queen Victoria will be published in the US this fall by Random House, New York, in Australia by Harper Collins and in the UK by Little Brown.

  Baird was based in the USA until 2011, working at Newsweek as columnist and deputy editor. She began work at the magazine as senior editor for Science, Society and Ideas. She edited and wrote cover stories on subjects including human evolution, the history of climate change denial, the mysterious lives of surrogate mothers, the politics of transgender, the significance of 1968, and the then vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, as well as a profile of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. In 2010 she moved with her family to Philadelphia and worked as a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

  Baird began her career in journalism at the Sydney Morning Herald, where she worked as a columnist, oped editor, education reporter and election editor. In 2006 and again at the end of 2011 she was the host of the in depth interview radio program “Sunday Profile” on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2012, she covered the US presidential campaign in Iowa for The Monthly, the ABC, and the Sun-Herald.

  In 2005, Baird was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press and Public Policy at Harvard, researching the global response to American opinion in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Her Ph.D., on female politicians and the press, formed the basis of her book, Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians (2004). Baird has also taught history (20th century cultural history and personal narratives, involving the study of letters, diaries and journals), and made radio documentaries on subjects as diverse as black metal music and convent education.

  Baird received both her B.A. and Ph.D. in history from Sydney University. She is a regular commentator on television and radio. She has also become expert in making play-doh, bug catchers and brownies for her two little kids, and lives near the sea, which she swims in as long and often as she can.

• Australian - http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/health/julia-baird-journalist-and-broadcaster-reveals-cancerbeating-battle/news-story/9b70a47f6e6f24b1809c8c24a1541919

  Julia Baird reveals cancer-beating battle
  Julia Baird has been off work after having tumours remove­d in June.

  The Australian
  1:16AM September 3, 2015
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  Mark Coultan
  State political correspondent
  Sydney
  @mcoultan

  Journalist, author and broadcaster Julia Baird has revealed in an intimate piece for The New York Times that she has had cancer, saying “stillness and faith can give you extraordinary strength”.

  Baird, one of the hosts of ABC’s The Drum, has been off work after having tumours remove­d in June.

  She says that in the months leading up to the discovery of the cancer, she felt bloated. “My clothes had grown snug, but my friends laughed and gently pointed to the vats of chocolate I consume when facing deadlines.

  “It felt as if I was carrying a baby. The enormous tumours that silently grew inside me suddenly ballooned without warning one weekend, pushing my belly out into an arc.”

  Initially diagnosed with advanced­ ovarian cancer, Baird was warned that her prognosis was not good, and spent two weeks waiting for an operation and wondering if she would see the end of the year.

  She writes of the day she was getting her son and daughter ready for school when she got bad news.

  “I was buttering sandwiches for their lunches when my surgeon called to tell me it looked as though it had spread to my liver.

  “I bit my lip, sliced the sandwiches in half, and held my children’s little hands tightly as we walked down the hill to the local red-brick primary school.”

  After a five-hour operation, the tumours on each of her ­ovaries were found to be not ­malignant, and it was discovered that she had a rarer, less aggressive form of cancer. She says her prognosis is now good and she is preparing to ­return to work.

  “But, like others, I will need to live with the fear of return. This week, my blood tests came back clear of cancer.”

  Baird, the sister of NSW Premier Mike Baird and daughter of former NSW and federal MP Bruce Baird, writes that the experience has taught her that one age-old truth: “Your family is everything.”

  She says that in the eight days she spent in intensive care she had drug-induced hallucinations so that her brother Mike “had three heads, one of my feet kept catching fire, and it rained periodically around my bed”.

  Baird was a campaigner for women in the Sydney synod of the Anglican Church. A journ­alist who has worked for The Sydney Morning Herald and Newsweek, she was awarded a PhD on women politicians and the press and is the author of Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians.

  She has been working on a ­biography of Queen Victoria.

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/nov/16/julia-baird-queen-victoria-would-have-been-a-nasty-woman-in-trumpian-terms

  Julia Baird: Queen Victoria would have been a 'nasty woman' in Trumpian terms

  The Australian journalist felt compelled to rescue Queen Victoria from history, seeing in the 19th century monarch a contemporary tale of how women are expected to behave
  Author Julia Baird with Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s portrait of Queen Victoria.
  Author Julia Baird with Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s portrait of Queen Victoria. Baird has written about Victoria as a strong female leader. Composite: Harper Collins

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  Bridie Jabour

  Bridie Jabour
  @bkjabour

  Tuesday 15 November 2016 20.33 GMT
  Last modified on Friday 19 May 2017 14.58 BST

  There is only one story around the world at the moment, splashed across front pages and leading news bulletins: the former-bankrupt millionaire turned reality television star turned pussy-grabber turned president of the United States.

  Donald Trump seems to have permeated everything, so it should come as no surprise that his name would come up in a conversation about Queen Victoria. Australian journalist and commentator Julia Baird’s 696-page book about the monarch has just been released, and when she meets me she has just wrapped up an interview with the national broadcaster about her impressions of the president-elect, who she joined for a New York Times editorial board meeting in January.

  Victoria: The Queen began germinating in 2008, when Hillary Clinton lost the democratic nomination to Barack Obama. Baird carried the idea with her as she followed Clinton’s ascension to secretary of state and Democratic nominee before the eventual defeat – a defeat which Baird partly attributes to Clinton’s gender.
  ITV didn’t need to embellish Queen Victoria’s life – it was wild enough already
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  “I do wonder about the part the strong queens of England have played in the [nation’s] psyche towards the acceptance of women in politics, and what kind of women. We’ve got Margaret Thatcher, we’ve got Theresa May, yet still today America cannot vote in Hillary Clinton,” Baird says over a salad. We’re sitting in a cafe down the road from the ABC, where she hosts news analysis TV show The Drum.

  Baird believes having strong female monarchs such as Victoria and Elizabeth II helped British people become comfortable with women in power. “Victoria was so tough and stubborn and sometimes rude, and refused to accept defeat. Refused to be told what to do,” she says. “She was micro reported on every second of the day and she behaved how she wanted to behave. That was quite different – she would’ve been a ‘nasty woman’ in Trumpian terms, without a doubt.”

  When Baird set out to write Victoria, she wanted to examine how the queen wielded power during her reign and how far – or little it seems – our acceptance of powerful women has come. The book chronicles Victoria’s life, but unlike other histories of the queen it charts her role as an “incredibly powerful working mother”, and explores how she managed her nine pregnancies and raising children while the monarch.
  Queen Victoria, aged four (oil on panel), by Stephan Poyntz Denning (1795-1864)
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  Queen Victoria, aged four (oil on panel), by Stephan Poyntz Denning (1795-1864). ‘Victoria was a short tempered and defiant girl,’ writes Baird. ‘She hated sitting still, hating taking medicine, and hated being told what to do.’ Photograph: Bridgeman Images/Harper Collins

  Baird says she was not particularly interested in royal history when she began the book, but after spending a year reading about Victoria was astounded by the myths the queen had been buried under, and the caricature she had become. In Baird’s words, she want to rescue Victoria from history.

  The queen, of course, did not earn her title – although Baird would argue she fought for it. Instead, she was born to the right parents at the right time.

  Baird contrasts Victoria’s indulged way of life with tales of what was going on beyond the palace walls: children being sexually assaulted in coalmines, pantless because of the heat; England’s ambivalence towards the the Irish famine, in which more than one million people starved. Victoria is depicted in the book as sympathetic to the plight of the working class – she donated the equivalent of roughly £200,000 in today’s money to the Irish. But it is likely she donated more to animal shelters over her lifetime.
  My ‘insane’ Uncle Ed tried to kill Queen Victoria – he was treated with kindness
  Penny Pepper
  Read more

  She may have been born into “the madness of inherited power”, but that doesn’t make her reign any less interesting, says Baird. “Because we’ve had few women elected by popular vote to lead, it’s very instructive and interesting to look at the women who inherited [power],” she says. Besides, many elected leaders – most of them men – are born into power as well.

  “There’s a fundamental thread running through western cultural thinking about the incompatibility of woman and power – that it’s surprising, that it’s secondary, that it only ever comes from someone else, under someone else’s tutelage or relation ... that it’s somehow less authoritative, [that their bad behaviour is] worse than others,” Baird says.

  There’s a fundamental thread running through western cultural thinking about the incompatibility of woman and power
  Julia Baird

  “What we often fail to portray is the incredible complexity of women in powerful roles, and what we’re capable of. [This is] largely because we are so blinkered by expectations of female behaviour – of what a powerful woman or a feminist looks like.

  “Victoria said women weren’t suited for public life, but she spent several decades protecting and demanding an influential place in it,” Baird says. “[It’s] like a lot of women who say they are not feminist now, all the while they’re collecting pay cheques and expecting to vote and expecting to have property rights, and to have recourse if anyone were to assault them. Her power was assumed to have come from the men around her, especially from her husband.”
  Photograph of Queen Victoria and her daughters clad in black, around a bust of Prince Albert.
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  In the period after Prince Albert’s death, Queen Victoria recreated sober mourning scenes for photographs with her daughters. ‘There was something almost spectacular in her grieving,’ says Baird. Photograph: The Royal Collection Trust

  In many ways, Prince Albert – an intellectual reformer with a social justice bent – was a superior monarch to Victoria. But she has almost been crowded out of her own story by him: by his role in the “golden age” of her reign, and by her extended grieving over his death.
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  The dominant narrative is that after Prince Albert died, when he was 42, Victoria withdrew from society and lost her way as queen. But while she did withdraw for a few years and wear black for the rest of her life – a kind of “widow superstar”, Baird says – “there was almost something spectacular in her grieving”. She maintained a very active role in politics and ruled for 40 years on her own.

  The gulf between the image of Victoria the queen and Victoria the actual woman is partly her own creation. While attempting to stop Gladstone from becoming prime minister – an outrageous intervention even for the time – and weighing in on wars, she was also writing and releasing hugely popular journal extracts, in which she portrayed herself as a likeable woman living a domestic life at Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands.
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  “I think it’s important to tell stories of women as fully human and complicated, and seek judgment [of women] that is not more excessive than that of a bloke. Why do so many women hate Hillary Clinton? Why is a gut instinct to hate her? I think it goes back to that fundamental disconnect between women and power,” Baird says.

  “The likability thing is a real burden, and it’s demonstrable: there is study after study that not only shows that women have to be more likable, but that they are genuinely considered less likable when they ask for more pay, or when they do certain jobs, or when they make tough decisions.”

  Baird worked on the book across three continents, visiting London each year as she moved from New York to Philadelphia to Sydney with her two young children. When the project began, she was the deputy editor of Newsweek; since then she has worked in Australian radio and TV, written columns for the New York Times, and been diagnosed with cancer – all while reading and writing hundreds of thousands of words about the queen.

  Baird carried her laptop with her everywhere, “grabbing the time” she could.

  “My little boy broke his leg and was in hospital and I had to live there with him for six weeks, and I just remember some of my friends coming in and saying, ‘OK, go,’ and I would dash downstairs to the cafe and [write] as much as I could. I wrote out the coronation chapter when he was in hospital,” she says. “There was no neat pattern.”

  Another was presented by the royal family itself: Baird was denied access to the royal archives for years. Eventually, Australia’s then-governor general Quentin Bryce put a good word in for her, a royal experience in the most classic sense: she got access based on the strength of her connections – not her PhD in history or book deal.
  Censoring Queen Victoria review – how two men created an icon

  Yvonne M Ward shows how a royal reputation was tidied up for posterity – no more sex drive and rude comments about foreigners. By Kathryn Hughes
  Read more

  The royal archives also requested she censor the book, taking out one of the most revelatory parts, about Victoria’s relationship with her servant John Brown after the death of Prince Albert. The passage came from information Baird had found outside the archive. She rejected the request.

  “There’s a lot of historians who are censored a lot of the time, I’ve seen it,” she says.

  The secrecy around the monarch continues today; Baird says it’s hard to say what role Queen Elizabeth II is playing in 2016 without access to her letters or journals.
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  “The thing that I wrestle with [about the monarchy], I know a lot of Brits wrestle with, is the expense and the secrecy. Trying to get the material to report properly, to write properly about any of the royals – how closed the archives are is a real problem.”

  Victoria: The Queen goes beyond the biography of a royal figure from 200 years ago; it is a contemporary tale of how women are expected to behave, and the conflicts between obligations to family and a career.

  “Sometimes even the most prominent women have been buried by mountains of myths,” Baird says.

  • This article was amended on 6 April 2017. An earlier version referred to Gladstone as Lord Gladstone.
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• Amazon -

  Julia Baird is a journalist, broadcaster, and author based in Sydney, Australia. She is a columnist for the International New York Times and Sydney Morning Herald and host of The Drum on ABC TV (Australia). Her writing has appeared in a host of publications including Newsweek, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Monthly,and Harper’s Bazaar. She has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Sydney. (Her 2004 book, Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians was based on her PhD research) In 2005, Baird was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.
  She is also an owl who aspires to be more like a fish.
  Baird lives by the sea with her two children and Australia's clumsiest cat.
  She is not the sister of John Lennon, nor any other Beatle.

• Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR - http://www.npr.org/2016/11/27/503489407/julia-baird-paints-a-stronger-more-likable-victoria-the-queen

  < Julia Baird Paints A Stronger, More Likable 'Victoria The Queen' November 27, 20168:38 AM ET 7:32 Download Facebook Twitter Google+ Email LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST: Victoria, queen and empress, once held the record as the longest-serving British monarch - 63 years on the throne. She was surpassed last year by her great-great-granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II. Though Victoria is often remembered as a dumpy little woman in perpetual mourning, biographer Julia Baird presents her differently. In her new book, "Victoria: The Queen," Victoria is a hardworking, power-loving monarch who is passionately in love with her husband Albert, with whom she had nine children before his death at the age of 42. Julia Baird joins me now from our studios in New York. Welcome. JULIA BAIRD: Hello. Thanks so much for having me. WERTHEIMER: Now, in my little introduction, I failed to mention, perhaps, the most intriguing part of your book, which is that Victoria had a very active love life. I guess we could infer that from the number of children she had. But... BAIRD: Right. WERTHEIMER: ...You tell us that she was a sexy lady. BAIRD: She really was. She - the way she spoke about her husband and their intimacy, the way she described him and how he looked in his tight white pants - she was a very passionate woman. I'll tell you one story about one thing I found that had not been written about before, which gives you some kind of insight into it. In Osborne House, a family home they had on the Isle of Wight, I was staring at a painting and a guide said to me, have a look closely at these paintings because there's often a trick in them. There's something concealed. And I stared at this painting for quite a while. It was these three women. It was a summer picnic, and they're sitting under a parasol and one of them is leaning back with this blissful look on her face. And if you look and look, you'll suddenly notice there's an extra pair of shoes coming out from under that woman's dress, right? WERTHEIMER: (Laughter). BAIRD: And then you look closely again and you see the outline of a man's back under there. Now, this was supposed to have been one of the first that Victoria bought - and bought for her and Albert. Now, if that doesn't tell you something about this young queen, I don't know what is. But it's certainly a side of her we never see because we tend to see her in these large, kind of formidable and forbidding statues. WERTHEIMER: She was a teenager when she inherited the throne, way down the line of royals who might rule England. Was she, do you think, in any way ready for this? BAIRD: She was ready in the sense that she was calm, and she was poised, and she wanted it. And she had had to fight off - like, her mother had wanted to become regent so Victoria would be - you know, become queen, you know, a few years later. Her mother's closest adviser, John Conroy, had tried to bully her into signing papers to say that could happen. She was surrounded by people who wanted to take the power away from her. But in her standing up to them, I think, in a way, she demonstrated that this was going to be a strong-minded woman. WERTHEIMER: She didn't really want to marry, I gather. She might have had the first Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen in mind, thinking that marriage would essentially cramp her style. BAIRD: Well, look, she was brought up in such a stifling system. It was called this Kensington System. She was not allowed to walk down stairs unless someone held her hand and she was accompanied. Every mouthful of her food was tasted in case someone was trying to poison her. She had a very sheltered childhood. And then suddenly - imagine the most rebellious teenager suddenly being given a throne. She becomes queen. And she was like, this is fantastic. She loved to dance. She was always the last at the party. She danced for hours. So she had a fantastic life when she first became queen. She absolutely relished it. WERTHEIMER: She did marry. She was just ecstatic about Albert. BAIRD: I know. Her diaries are full of lots of underlinings and capitals and italics. She talked about how he was such a fine figure. And she loved his mustache, which she called his mustachios. In fact, she ordered that all the soldiers in her army should then have a mustache just like Albert. So she really fell very deeply, madly in love with him. And she proposed to him, which was nerve-wracking. But because of her status, she had to propose. WERTHEIMER: She had to be the one. He couldn't do it. BAIRD: No, that's right. And in the first few days, she's really talking about how much she loved watching him shave and him helping put on her stockings and those intimate details. But there were also signs of some kind of tension between the as well because he was very keen to take on responsibility and official duties, and he was incredibly bright. But she didn't want to relinquish any of those to him in the early stages. WERTHEIMER: You know, I don't think that anybody believes that Elizabeth II rules much of anything in the modern world. But Victoria, she really did rule? BAIRD: Oh, she absolutely did. I think that's one of the things that really surprised me. I felt that - when I was trying to unpack a lot of the myths about Victoria, I really felt that people had not recognized her love of ruling and her sense of duty about it. And at a time when there was a transition to a constitutional queen - so much more of a symbolic role - she was constantly trying to protect her own authority. And when one of those complicated creatures who would say, oh, I don't think women are fit for ruling. This political stuff isn't - is obviously for men. But you will not be prime minister, sir. You know what I mean? (LAUGHTER) BAIRD: And she had much more of a hand on the realm than I think we tend to think. And we also forget she ruled for 40 years on her own. WERTHEIMER: On her own because her husband died. BAIRD: That's right. WERTHEIMER: Albert died. She was in deep mourning for her husband, and she sort of faded away from public life. Late in this widowhood period, Victoria had a close relationship with a servant. His name was John Brown. He was a Scotsman. And she and he had a relationship which has been kind of a mystery. BAIRD: A mystery and a scandal and been gossiped about for quite some time. I mean, even her own family, at the time, called him the queen's stallion. He had been her Highlands servant, initially Albert's. And he's always in her journals as this physical presence. He lifted her up over streams. He kind of guided her, and he protected her. He called her woman (laughter). WERTHEIMER: (Laughter) The queen. BAIRD: He made her laugh when he told her she'd put on weight lately and she was heavier than the other ladies. But it's a fascinating relationship because of its depth - the amount of time they spent together, her fierce loyalty, her complete denial to take on board any of her family's insistence that this was, in fact, causing a scandal. And I was reading through her doctor's journals in - which are kept in Scotland in the family's house. And he had written in this tiny almost code on the corner of one of the pages that he walked in on Victoria and John Brown playing some strange kind of game where he lifted up his kilt and said, oh, is it here? And the queen lifted up her skirt and said, oh, no, it's here. What it is... WERTHEIMER: Whoa. BAIRD: (Laughter) Right? - is open to speculation. But really, what it did show is a remarkable intimacy. WERTHEIMER: Julia Baird's new biography is called "Victoria: The Queen." Thank you very much for talking with us. BAIRD: It's been such a great pleasure. Thank you.

Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire
Brad Hooper
113.4 (Oct. 15, 2016): p15.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm

* Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire. By Julia Baird. Nov. 2016. 720p. Random, $35 (9781400069880). 941.081.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Given the many books about Queen Victoria, one wonders if there is more to say, but <> readers will feel as though the story of the famous British queen is being told for the first time. The second but no-less-important impression Baird leaves readers with is the sense that she has great appreciation for the queen's husband, Prince Albert, and his very important and self-created role in British political and public life. Baird also clarifies issues that have habitually clouded an accurate accounting of the queen's character and reign, beginning with the idea, an incorrect one, as it turns out, that Victoria pretty much retreated from life when the prince consort died. The truth as Baird establishes it is that, for the 39 years left to her, Victoria continued to exhibit the great strength of character that first revealed itself when she was a little girl whose chance of inheriting the throne appeared slim. Baird does not turn a blind eye on Victoria's darker sides, including her willfulness, selfishness, and self-pity. But that simply adds dimensions to a significant character.--Brad Hooper

Hooper, Brad
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hooper, Brad. "Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 15. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771216&it=r&asid=f39f48a318e8f914c097973235557d99. Accessed 29 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A468771216
Julia Baird: VICTORIA
(Sept. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

Julia Baird VICTORIA Random House (Adult Nonfiction) 35.00 11, 15 ISBN: 978-1-4000-6988-0

Australian journalist and historian Baird (Media Tarts: Female Politicians and the Press, 2004) draws on previously unpublished sources to fashion a lively, perceptive portrait of the long-reigning queen.Victoria (1819-1901), writes the author, was an adoring wife, overbearing mother, and “a clever and forceful political calculator.” Characterizing her subject as “the most famous working mother in the world,” Baird focuses intently on love, sex, and family: Victoria’s marriage to Albert and protracted mourning after he died; her attitudes toward childbearing and mothering her extensive brood; her postpartum depressions; her adoration of the “blunt, bearded Scotsman” John Brown; and her relationships with many men in her government. Although there are few surprises for readers familiar with previous biographies by A.N. Wilson, Christopher Hibbert, Matthew Dennison, and Carrolly Erickson, to name a few, Baird shrewdly assesses the quality of the queen’s family life and creates sharply drawn portraits of the major players in her circle. The queen “budded in the presence of a man who charmed her, who confided in her and sought her approval,” such as her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, with whom she had “one of the great platonic romances of modern history,” and the sympathetic, witty Benjamin Disraeli. As for her marriage, Baird sees both Victoria and Albert as stubborn and strong-willed. “Albert was aiming for greatness,” the author observes, and was happy when his wife was pregnant so he could take a role in governing. He believed women were inferior to men, and Victoria conceded, “Albert’s talents were superior.” As far as motherhood, Baird reveals that Victoria hated being pregnant, feared that she would die in childbirth, was sometimes “doting,” but also described her children “bluntly and often harshly” and clearly had her favorites. On the political landscape, Victoria witnessed the devastating Crimean War, uprisings across Europe, famine in Ireland, and domestic social pressures. She sought to transcend a “primarily ceremonial and symbolic” role to one of power and influence.

A well-researched biography sensitive to Queen Victoria as a woman.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Julia Baird: VICTORIA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463215903&it=r&asid=82365236a3ea0999fec23d8f12e3f143. Accessed 29 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A463215903
'Victoria the Queen' is a cheerful, chatty success from start to finish
Steve Donoghue
(Dec. 28, 2016): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference

Byline: Steve Donoghue

Journalist and columnist Julia Baird's new book Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire, is an inviting thing, sumptuously produced by Random House and adorned with a fetching portrait-detail of the young queen done by Franz Winterhalter. Its subtitle promises the prose equivalent of the cinematic payoff viewers have been enjoying with ITV's lavish TV series starring Jenna Coleman: a look behind the forbidding Victorian facade. It's a promise writers have been making about this particular monarch for well over a century.

Long before Victoria died in January of 1901, she'd been the subject of biographies both good and otherwise, and the floodgates were flung wide upon the publication of Lytton Strachey's slim, slightly but nonetheless scandalously snide life in 1921. Since then, there have been dozens of biographies, each struggling in its own way to grapple with the vast length of the subject's life.

Victoria was born in 1819 and reigned for 63 years; she was Empress of India and mother to an entire generation of European royalty; by sheer force of personality she impressed her name on an age but remained very self-consciously remote for more than half her long time on the throne. She was both highly opinionated about the workings of the governments that acted in her name and almost entirely powerless to affect those workings in any concrete way.

In the informal concepts that have attached to royalty since her own day, the Crown could question, quibble, and occasionally quarrel, but statesmen and parliamentarians only deferred to her - and continue to defer to her successors - out of an ironclad sense of tradition. It's an incredible combination of power and impotence, and for well over a century it's presented biographers with some daunting challenges, the main one being the contrast between the vivid colors of Queen Victoria's reign and its historical insignificance; a widely-venerated monarch who needed her government's permission even to change the drapes in one of her many homes.

Baird takes what is by now a standard approach to this paradox: she concentrates on the personal stuff and keeps the broader social and political issues of Victorian times firmly in the background. Readers might recall this approach from Stanley Weintraub's 1987 book "Victoria: An Intimate Biography "or Christopher Hibbert's 2000 book "Queen Victoria: A Personal History 2000." Even Elizabeth Longford's 1964 book "Victoria R.I." - by most measures still the best work on this monarch - found it expedient to balance its broader history with family drama.

Along this pattern, "Victoria the Queen" is a cheerful, chatty success from start to finish. Baird has that enviable combination of qualifications: a degree in history and a career in journalism. It's true she's prone to overstating things - at one point, for instance, she mentions the 39 years Victoria ruled after the death of her husband Prince Albert and rather absurdly claims, "we know little about this period."

Her <>: <>, and so do all the people who come into her orbit, especially the handsome young man who would become her hard-working husband. "He walked into Windsor Castle, nauseated and exhausted," Baird writes about his visit in 1839, "and looked up at the small figure looming above him on the stairs, the most powerful woman in the world."

Victoria herself referred to marriage as a lottery ("the happiness is always an exchange"), and as all her earlier biographers have done, Baird makes it clear that the glowing central fact of Victoria's life was that she won this lottery: her bond with Prince Albert, the subject of Gillian Gill's delightful 2009 book "We Two," is the dramatic high point of "Victoria the Queen," although Baird also does a lively, excellent job of detailing Victoria's later years, a life that one historian described as "spent in high places but without luxury or extravagance and bounded by hard work."

Baird paints a touching picture of those final decades, <>. She tried - sometimes clumsily but always earnestly - to be cheerful, to be involved, and especially not to be boring or pompous to her close friends and family members. She lost none of her arresting habit of being oddly authentic, and as Baird makes clear, she was dogged in her duty to the end. "A woman who had spent most of her life praying to be with her Albert in heaven was still begging her doctor for more time on earth," she winningly writes. "There were more things to sort out, more disasters to prevent, more wars to fight, more soldiers to protect."

"Victoria the Queen" ends on that note of devotion, and maybe, in a book about the founder of modern British constitutional monarchy, that's only fitting.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Donoghue, Steve. "'Victoria the Queen' is a cheerful, chatty success from start to finish." Christian Science Monitor, 28 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475311460&it=r&asid=3d53c287d4e07bc219e2546597b78118. Accessed 29 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A475311460

Hooper, Brad. "Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 15. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA468771216&asid=f39f48a318e8f914c097973235557d99. Accessed 29 May 2017. "Julia Baird: VICTORIA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA463215903&asid=82365236a3ea0999fec23d8f12e3f143. Accessed 29 May 2017. Donoghue, Steve. "'Victoria the Queen' is a cheerful, chatty success from start to finish." Christian Science Monitor, 28 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA475311460&asid=3d53c287d4e07bc219e2546597b78118. Accessed 29 May 2017.

• Chicago Tribune
  http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-books-1225-victoria-julia-baird-20161221-story.html
  Word count: 1653

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  Baird thoroughly and engagingly strives to restore a truer perspective of both woman and sovereign in her fine work, "Victoria: The Queen." The Australia-based author, broadcaster and journalist not only tells the story of Victoria's life but places her in the context of her 19th-century world, a time of breathtaking technological advances set amid the polluted muck of unrelieved poverty and suffering, an era of empire-building and bloody oppression, an age where women began to fight for their rights while their queen looked askance at women's suffrage.

  "What we have truly forgotten today is that Victoria is a woman under whose auspices the modern world was made," Baird writes.

  Queen Victoria was only human, but she also was <>. <>, some of which were contradictory, to show how Victoria did indeed have a mind of her own — despite her husband and prime ministers — and lived and ruled the way she thought best.

  The idea for this book was sparked, Baird writes, by the 2008 presidential election in the United States, when Hillary Clinton tried to win the Democratic nomination and Sarah Palin served as the Republican vice presidential candidate. Baird was working for Newsweek then, and "our editorial team had vigorously debated the way we talk about women in positions of power," Baird wrote. "One of the more robust arguments we had was about how we are still seemingly unable to reconcile women and power; too often it seems an awkward, surprising, unlikely and troubling pairing." Her editor then suggested that Queen Victoria could use a fresh look, and after a few months reading an "unvarying repetition of the same views about Victoria, with rare fresh interrogation of new material," Baird found she agreed.

  A new biography of Queen Victoria seems so right for right now. For while she lived a life of almost unimagined privilege and wealth set in various palaces and castles, hers is a story that will seem all too familiar to today's readers, particularly women struggling, like Victoria, to balance it all.
  Queen Victoria of England
  Queen Victoria, shown in an 1842 portrait, grasped the mantle of power when other women had none. (Imagno / Getty Images)

  Born fifth in line to the throne in the final year of the reign of her grandfather, King George III, Victoria was 18 when she became queen after the death of her uncle, King William IV. Forced from an early age to juggle personal desire and public policy, she struggled to be both woman and queen, wife and monarch. She fought for decades to protect her royal prerogatives, to influence ministers and policy, and to generally be heard and heeded — even by her dear husband, Prince Albert.

  "At the time of her wedding, she was as contradictory and complicated as she would be throughout her life: publicly vowing to obey her husband at precisely the same time she privately overruled his wishes,'' Baird wrote.

  While Albert was Victoria's great love, Baird tells of how he methodically undermined Victoria's confidence in herself as he sought to "better" her as queen, wife and mother. It was only when Albert died in 1861, a wrenching loss that Victoria held onto vividly for the rest of her life, that she found her footing again.

  Widowhood is what Victoria is most remembered for today. Even by the overwrought standards of the day, the queen's mourning was deemed excessive. Yet she rarely, if ever, yielded to that so-public sorrow. Victoria dressed all in black and tossed her corsets, swapped a crown for a black bonnet (albeit one trimmed with diamonds on occasion) and withdrew from public view as much as possible to await the death she confidently thought was coming. Even her effigy on the tomb she built to share with Albert portrays her as she looked at the time of her husband's death.

  "Victoria did not want to die. Perhaps the greatest contradiction of her character was her belief that she yearned for death; in truth, she clung tenaciously to life," Baird wrote, adding a few paragraphs later, "There was always more. Victoria believed that her greatest work — to improve herself, as Albert had bidden her — was not yet complete."
  Penguin Random House (Penguin Random House / HANDOUT)

  Victoria died in January 1901 at the age of 81. She had spent 63 years and seven months on the throne — a record of longevity eclipsed only on Sept. 9, 2015, by her great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II.

  "The world shuddered at the news of the queen's death," Baird wrote. And, indeed, as she noted in the book, Victoria personified — first as queen of England and, from 1876 onward, empress of India — British imperialism in every land over which the Union Jack was flown. She also represented continuity as the United Kingdom and the rest of the world underwent unimaginable modernization.

  Baird's book also emphasizes Victoria's role as a woman who ruled. The queen "had, in a way she did not anticipate, changed everything for women," Baird wrote. "She stirred something that was difficult to name, a longing, or a stiffening of the spine; she was a visible sign of a woman who adored her family, yet had full rights and an independent income. H.G. Wells believed that at the moment the crown was placed on her head, there was a 'stir of emancipation.'"

  "Victoria's heart beat strongly to her last breath," Baird wrote, adding that this was something her doctor made a point of noting. "This is the greatest clue to understanding the woman who helped shape the modern world, and dispelling myths about her supposed passivity, her reliance on men and distaste for power. She may have complained often, but she persisted. She grieved for decades, but as generations of statesmen witnessed, she also fought without flinching. Her unbending, steadfast presence shaped a century as she grasped the mantle of power when other women had none. To fly over the London today and see her magisterial marble figure looking above the streets is to marvel at how a reclusive, widowed mother of nine achieved unparalleled greatness. The answer is simple: Victoria endured."

  But Victoria did not endure unedited or uncensored. Her eldest son, Bertie, now King Edward VII, and her youngest child, Princess Beatrice, were both keenly aware of what Victoria described as her "many faults." And they took steps to erase them — historical record be damned. Beatrice spent years censoring and rewriting passages of her mother's diaries — burning the originals when done. The new king worked to eliminate any vestiges of the queen's staff he felt held undue influence, notably John Brown.

  Brown, the "Queen's Highland Servant," had such an unusually close and intense relationship with the widowed queen that it provoked considerable discussion then and now. While Baird wrote that the "extent or nature of their physical relationship" is unknown, there "was a level of intimacy between them that would have scandalized society."

  How Victoria's story is told is still, apparently, a sensitive topic some 115 years after her death. In an author's note at the end of the book, Baird writes of being denied access to the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle because this was her first biography and she hadn't written about the royal family before. She later gained permission thanks to the intercession of the then-governor general of Australia. Like other researchers, Baird signed a contract promising to submit prior to publication "all intended quotations from records in the Royal Archives, and all intended passages based on information based on those records." Baird wrote that she submitted the entire manuscript as she had "used a great deal of archival material."

  What Baird got back was a letter from the senior archivist in which she was reportedly asked to "remove large sections of my book based on material I had found not inside but outside the archives." (Emphasis added by Baird.) That material came from the papers of Sir James Reid, who was the queen's doctor and was present at her death. The letter cited "documents in which the Queen issued instructions as to who should tend her in her final illness, arrangements for her funeral and what items she wanted placed in her coffin." Those items included, as Baird noted in the book, not only family photographs and mementos but personal items that had belonged to Brown.

  Baird decided not to remove the material.

  "It is my hope that those who read this book will understand how intently and thoroughly I have researched the life of Queen Victoria, and how inconsistent with that approach it would have been to delete large sections of the book for no clearly articulated reason," Baird wrote. "It was the object of this book to hack through myths, not hew to them."

  I'm sure Baird's brave decision not to honor the request means she will likely never be welcome at the Royal Archives again. That's a pity as this fine work, with its family tree, maps, detailed notes and extensive bibliography, shows she has considerable talent for royal biographies. Unfortunately, royal bios usually need access to royal archives.

  At least Baird can have the considerable satisfaction of a job extremely well done, of doing her utmost to bring the true Queen Victoria back into the light.

  Bill Daley is a Tribune reporter.

  wdaley@chicagotribune.com

  Twitter @billdaley

  'Victoria: The Queen'

  By Julia Baird, Random House, 697 pages, $35

• New York Times Book Review
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/books/review-victoria-the-queen-julia-baird.html
  Word count: 1141

  Review: ‘Victoria the Queen’ Delves Into Her Epic Reign

  Books of The Times

  By JANET MASLIN DEC. 20, 2016
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  One of the first photographs for which Queen Victoria posed. Credit Roger Fenton/Getty Images

  You can learn a lot about a queen from the contents of her coffin. In her frisky, adventurous new biography of Queen Victoria, Julia Baird offers not only an inventory of the items with which the queen wished to be buried but also the exact placement she specified for them. Of course her treasured husband, Prince Albert, would be represented; Victoria had spent much of her life draped in black, showily mourning his death. So Albert’s framed photograph and a cast of his hand were duly buried with her.

  But John Brown, a Scotsman who became both Victoria’s employee and constant companion, took pride of place. A leather case holding photographs of Brown and a lock of his hair was to be placed right in the queen’s hand. Brown’s handkerchief was to be laid atop her, while Albert’s was merely to be included in the large collection of burial accouterments. She also wanted photographs of all her children and grandchildren, and to be adorned with 10 rings, including five from Albert, and one that had belonged to Brown’s mother.

  As Ms. Baird notes, this information isn’t new. But she was nonetheless asked to remove it from the book by the senior archivist of the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. Those archives hold extremely rare material to which Ms. Baird was privy. And in exchange for access she agreed to remove any Royal Archives material she was asked to from her finished book. But when asked to remove the results of her independent research, she refused. “It was the object of this book to hack through myths, not hew to them,” she writes.

  When Ms. Baird goes after those myths, her alternative versions are exhilarating. She describes how and why young Victoria, born in 1819, had to be a fighter from the start: “Not long after she pulled the first fistfuls of air into her lungs, there were rumors that her wicked uncles were planning to kill her.” She details the wretched behavior of those uncles, all sons of the famously mad King George III, who gradually cleared a path for her. And she shows why Victoria needed to develop a strong backbone long before she ever dreamed of being queen, thanks to the ways in which her father’s death and mother’s treachery shaped her.

  This book shows how Victoria’s girlish naughtiness turned into a regal, willful, complex nature that other biographers have tended to simplify. It’s also very astute about the way the man she deemed pure perfection, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (her cousin), would undermine that nature during their years together. Ms. Baird brings a strong feminist awareness to the ways in which Victoria’s letters, edited by two men, have been censored to excise the full range of her personality, and also to the subordinate role any wife was expected to assume when Victoria was a young bride. Victoria’s willingness to let this happen is contrasted with the life and work of her contemporary, Florence Nightingale, who fought to fulfill her ambitions.
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  Julia Baird Credit Alex Ellinghausen

  Queen or no queen, Victoria took up the nonstop business of childbearing (she had six children from 1840 to 1846, and then three others at more widely spaced intervals) and let Albert assume some of her royal role. She accepted being addressed by her husband as “Dear Child.” And she was extremely happy during these early days of marriage, another aspect of her life that sometimes gets short shrift. Though she was not partial to infants, both she and Albert could be unusually doting parents. And they relished private time with their children on the Isle of Wight, where they built a home instead of inheriting one. Ms. Baird’s book provides the contrast of Buckingham Palace, rat-infested and smelling strongly of sewage, to make this seaside retreat all the more alluring.

  But “Victoria the Queen” describes the 20 years of Victoria’s marriage to Albert as the weakest period of her reign. It presents her as working tirelessly but too deferentially to sustain her authority. It was only after Albert’s death — and the years of numbing grief that had the English wondering whether their queen was still able to fulfill her responsibilities — that she could recover her grip, return to politics, deal with prime ministers she either liked (Disraeli) or detested (Gladstone) and win back her subjects’ loyalty.
  Photo
  Credit Patricia Wall/The New York Times

  It helped that she fell happily in love with John Brown, the Scottish servant who doted on her, teased her and never dreamed of treating her with condescension. If there’s one thing missing from the book, it’s Ms. Baird’s thoughts on why Victoria let herself become submissive to Albert for so long, but perhaps the answers to that are too obviously linked to the loss of a father so early in life. In any case, she adored being coddled, and Ms. Baird says she got that from Brown. And as many witnesses attested, she also got a lot of shocking back talk and loved it. And however he earned the nickname the Queen’s Stallion (a chapter heading here), Victoria seemed to love him for that, too.

  Victoria was lucky enough to reign over Britain during 63 mostly peaceful years, from June 20, 1837, to Jan. 22, 1901. She had limited knowledge of both the Crimean and Boer Wars but was sheltered from much of the bad news. (She did know “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” written by her friend Alfred, Lord Tennyson, about the Crimean. Tennyson was one of many who found her prettier than portraits make her appear.)

  The horrors that loomed largest in her life were much more personal. She lived through the deaths of many close relatives, including children and grandchildren. Hemophilia ran in her family (and passed, through one daughter, to Spanish royalty). And she spent much of her life in physical pain, thanks to the ravages of childbirth. She was so delighted to be given chloroform for the birth of her eighth, that baby Leopold was nicknamed Anesthesia.

  Follow Janet Maslin on Twitter: @JanetMaslin

  Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire
  By Julia Baird
  Illustrated. 696 pages. Random House. $35.

• Sydney Morning Herald
  http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/victoria-the-queen-review-julia-bairds-feminist-life-of-the-emperor-monarch-20161202-gt2hcd.html
  Word count: 1345

  December 10 2016
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  Victoria the Queen review: Julia Baird's feminist life of the emperor monarch

  Lucy Sussex

  BIOGRAPHY
  Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman who Ruled an Empire
  JULIA BAIRD
  HARPERCOLLINS, $72.95

  In the 19th century, ultimate power resided within a little black dress. On a tall woman it would have reached the knees, but since its wearer was less than five feet, and even shorter when aged, it covered her decently from neck to toe. It was lacy and frilled, but otherwise plain, a statement of mourning. The waist was wide, uncorseted, for this woman liked food and hated constraints. She ruled over a vast empire, a constitutional monarch in an era when women were otherwise denied rights. She was Queen Victoria, Britannia Gloriatrix, the embodiment of her time.

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  Queen Victoria and John Brown.
  Queen Victoria and John Brown. Photo: Supplied

  In life, the Queen was formidable. In death, she presents major problems for the biographer, not the least being the hagiography that saw much of her writings destroyed or censored. Her life was long, well-documented, and contained a cast of thousands, many relatives. She also lived through a period of extraordinary change, in areas ranging from the technological and philosophical to the social. The era produced Darwin, Marx, Wilde – but also wars, repression and colonial land-grabs.

  How can such a panorama be contained within the compass of a book? Many have tried, from Lytton Strachey to Christopher Hibbert. Inevitably, each decade views Victoria via its own preoccupations. Julia Baird, the latest in the lineage, has academic history training, but is primarily a political journalist. The book consequently is written with a journalist's facility, a historian's research, and with much empathy for an often difficult woman. It comprises a political, feminist guide to Victoria. Small wonder the book's blurbs come from Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb.

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  Victoria the Queen, by Julia Baird.
  Victoria the Queen, by Julia Baird.

  Baird does not claim Victoria as feminist – she had no time for female suffrage. Her exceptionalism was sincere, for a queen did not need the vote. As a successful and strong woman in an era of near-total patriarchy, she fully deserves the feminist approach. And since the head of a nation, however symbolic, is necessarily a political animal, it is folly to consider Victoria only as a domestic female, mother and wife. If anything, Victoria was a British lioness, fiercely protective and deadlier than the male.

  Baird's view of Victoria is timely, given that women in power remain regrettably problematic: particularly in Australia and with the 2016 US election. Unlike Julia Gillard and Hillary Clinton, Victoria had few qualifications for her role beyond birth. She was naturally robust, but, if somewhat under-educated, was intelligent, and extremely tough. Men tried to control her, but only one really succeeded: Prince Albert, during a time when constant childbearing left Victoria debilitated, and even postnatally depressed.
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  In the two decades of their marriage, Victoria did conform to the contemporary ideal of the woman as ivy, twined around the masculine oak. Otherwise, she was steely, independent, and in control.

  Prince Albert seems admirable rather than likeable, despite the Queen's adoration. It did not stop them having terrific spats. Baird quotes some of their small surviving correspondence, in which he called her "my child" and lectured her unmercifully. Albert was faithful, well-meaning, and had a reform agenda. To him, she was an intellectual inferior, without acknowledging her real shrewdness and strength. He was also a control freak extraordinaire, watching her maids dressing her, and offering fashion critiques. His micromanagement became obsessive, as this king without the title worked himself to death at the age of 42.

  The Queen, left with a kingdom and nine children, one with haemophilia, was grief-stricken. She went into seclusion, justifiably, given the many attempts to assassinate her. If she felt herself utterly alone, it was something she had known before, in her teen years. As a young girl she had fought as fiercely as the young Elizabeth I for her integrity, if not head. Approaching menopause, with its surge of new energies, she drew on that self-reliance, and survived another 40 years.

  The most recent reputable biography of Victoria, by A. N. Wilson, gave space to her politics, but for Baird it is a major focus. The Queen worked closely with her prime ministers, and her politics being personal, her increasingly Tory stance had more to do with dislike of the reformist Gladstone, and friendship with Disraeli. Gladstone, like Albert, considered women inferior; Disraeli did not, even favouring female suffrage.

  Other prime ministers paid tribute to her industry and good sense: Lord Salisbury said: "She knows what she is talking about." She might not agree with her ministers, but they got her opinions, strongly and cogently argued. Her portfolio was her Queendom, later Empire; and she was on top of the subject.

  To read this book is to see myths challenged, about Victoria, feminine rule, and the 19th century. On a personal level the Queen was amused, and highly sexual. She also presided over a great era of reform, which improved the lives of millions. Yet, as Baird notes, it also contained some of the worst excesses of colonialism. That is one contradiction, but the Queen was a mass of them. "People are complex," Jenny Macklin said of Kevin Rudd. How else could Victoria have recovered from the loss of Albert with John Brown?

  The nature of their relationship has been obscured by determined censorship from the Queen's children. It continues, despite Mrs Brown: Baird was asked by Buckingham Palace to remove matter from the diaries of the Queen's last doctor. She refused, having struck gold, a witness statement of flirtation – although flirting acknowledges sexual attraction without necessarily acting upon it.

  More significant is that the Queen instructed she was to be buried with a ring from Brown upon her small hand. As with discussions of historical lesbians, where sexual acts cannot be proved, they become immaterial. What really matters is love, and Baird states categorically that Victoria loved Brown.

  In her enterprise, Baird has been aided by Victorianist and researcher Catherine Pope. I located only one mistake, likely a proofreading cut. Nor did I feel the urge to check the sources for a dubious detail, to find the author had made stuff up.

  More problematic to historians here is the occasional creative non-fiction, where the writer not only imagines themselves into a scene, but into the head of the protagonists. The past is truly foreign, and we cannot know how people thought, only their words and deeds. Thus, the section devoted to Victoria's marriage reads somewhat like a historical romance, although we are spared the sex scene. It is true to the Queen's highly sentimental spirit, but still off-putting.

  These quibbles apart, Baird's book is to be commended. She does not, like Wilson, get mired in a mass of detail, sensibly avoiding the complications of the extended royal family, where biographers are apt to get confused. The book is 500 pages, but nary wastes a word. She is also able to move towards a better sense of narrative closure: Victoria dying in her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm's arms, in the middle of the Boer conflict, and with the First World War already foreshadowed.

  The book ends with another contradiction: Victoria might not have approved of suffragettes yet her example, of a capable woman in power, surely inspired them. In brief, Baird nails Victoria, with sympathy but not uncritically. There can be no higher praise.

  Lucy Sussex is the author of Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (Text).

• Age
  http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/09/10/1094789674051.html
  Word count: 1130

  No more a novelty element
  Reviewer Pamela Bone
  September 11, 2004
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  Media Tarts: How the Australian press frames female politicians,
  By Julia Baird,
  Scribe, $32.95

  Will Ross Cameron, Liberal MP in the marginal Sydney seat of Parramatta, suffer electoral defeat because of his public confession that he had sex with another woman while his wife was pregnant with twins? (Did we really need to know this, Ross?) Perhaps it won't do him much harm at all. Campaigning in the street recently, he was told by one (male) voter that his courage and honesty was admirable. The media reaction to his confession has been fairly muted. The only reason it is an issue at all is that Cameron, father of four young children, is a "morals" campaigner who also "did not deny" an earlier extramarital affair.

  But imagine if Cameron was a woman. First, any mother of four young children who enters federal politics must be the subject of great curiosity. Is she a superwoman? Who's looking after the children? Is she so ambitious she couldn't have waited until her children were older?
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  As for a mother of four, who's also a politician in a key seat, with an election looming, confessing to adultery - that's a story!

  Quite likely as big a story as the revelation (not confession) that Cheryl Kernot had a sexual relationship with a student at a school where she taught - after they both left the school - or the even more scandalous news that she had an affair with her Labor colleague Gareth Evans.

  Some media commentators went so far as to agree with the judgement of West Australian MP Don Randall, who told parliament that Kernot had the morals of "an alley cat on heat". Who will say that Cameron appears to have the morals of a tom cat on the prowl? Oh well, I will.

  The old gender double-standard is alive and well. But here's the good news: it's not nearly as well as it used to be. If increased media curiosity about the physical appearance and personal lives of male politicians is an advance, an advance there has been. And when you have the prime minister and the leader of the opposition competing with each other over who spent most time reading to their children, you've got to think some progress has been made.

  Indeed, as Sydney Morning Herald columnist Julia Baird notes in her new book, Media Tarts, there is something tired and deflated about the debate regarding women MPs: "Cliches are resorted to, tired assumptions are reproduced and the rhetoric about their relationship to the media has been marooned between two strands of thought. The first claims there has been no bias and the second exaggerates that bias, assuming it is unassailable and overwhelming."

  So why renew the debate? Women now make up a quarter of all MPs in Australia - though, as Baird points out, it's taken a century to get to this level. But a quarter is not equality. Indeed, it's not even the "critical mass" of about one-third that feminists used to argue was necessary before the presence of women would change politics.

  Besides, women politicians are still subjected to greater media scrutiny and judged according to higher standards than male politicians and, unless this is examined and challenged, it will not change. And while this remains the case, it will deter some women from entering politics.

  The stereotyping and trivialising of women may occur far less overtly these days than it did in the 1970s, but it is still clearly identifiable: "So, Nat, has your partner popped the question yet?" a radio journalist fired at Senator Natasha Stott Despoja when she gave a press conference on taking leadership of the Australian Democrats. "Just been elected leader of the Australian Democrats; thought we might talk politics," she replied.

  What male politician has ever been subjected to as much attention as Stott Despoja has, over her shoes, her hair, her alleged petulance, the fact that she was attractive, blonde and "only 32" when she became leader? (Michael Lavarch was attorney-general at 31; Peter Costello, opposition spokesman on corporate law reform and consumer affairs at 32.)

  The trouble is that women are still enough of a novelty for the media to want to take more notice of them. But few recognise that part of the problem for women MPs is not disdain from journalists, but excessive enthusiasm, Baird argues. Nor are women themselves blameless in this scrutiny. The assumption - often fostered by women to their own advantage - that women are less corrupt, more ethical than men and that their presence will bleach politics of grime, has been their greatest burden.

  A World Bank report of a couple of years ago found that countries that had more women in their governments also had less corruption in government. One hesitates to say this means women are intrinsically more honest than men. Perhaps the answer is that they have not been in positions of power long enough to be corrupted by it; or perhaps countries with more women in their parliaments were better countries to start with.

  In any case, it was always safer to argue that women should be in power in equal numbers simply because they are half the population; for as sure as you start by saying women are needed to make governments kinder and fairer, you will be pointed to women who did the opposite, Margaret Thatcher being the name most frequently invoked.

  Julia Baird has interviewed dozens of women in politics, as well as columnists and opinion leaders in the press gallery for this <> (it has a great cover, too): Bronwyn (the woman who sought too much power without permission) Bishop, Carmen (the woman who claimed to be better than the men) Lawrence, Cheryl (the woman who complained too much) Kernot and Natasha (the woman who got too much publicity) Stott Despoja.

  <> - not that there's anything wrong with that; there has been, and remains, plenty to rant about - but cautions women politicians against playing the <<"gender card">>. Instead, they must be smart about the way the media operates. For hell hath no fury like a media pack when a woman, once promoted by them as a saint, turns out to be a flawed human being after all.

  Pamela Bone is an associate editor of The Age and author of Up We Grew: Stories of Australian Childhood published by Melbourne University Publishing.

• Australian Review of Public Affairs
  http://www.australianreview.net/digest/2005/03/savage.html
  Word count: 2216

  21 March 2005
  Women in politics: destroyed by the media or slowly changing the status quo?

  Shelly Savage, University of Sydney

  Julie Baird, Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians, Carlton North, Scribe Publications, 2004 (pp 328). ISBN 1-92076-923-4 (paperback) RRP $32.95.

  Avoid being photographed in a ballgown or a bikini, if you want to succeed in politics. Establish a serious profile instead, Julia Baird advises women in Media Tarts. Don’t draw attention to your private life, dodge the personality cult, cop criticism, treat journalists as neither friends nor foe, don’t expect favours from women in the media, talk directly, answer honestly and beware the gender card (pp. 241–246). This is precisely what the new wave woman of politics is doing and partly why she now ‘struggles more with invisibility than with the excessive attention or curiosity shown by the press towards the novel political woman in the 1970s’ (p. 240). But if Baird’s thesis holds, this new dearth of publicity will not hinder these women’s careers, rather it will help deliver them the respect and longevity required to consolidate their political power.

  In Media Tarts Baird argues that women in Australian politics have punched above their weight, gaining additional media attention on the strength of their novelty value and because of the hyper-enthusiastic quest for a woman prime minister. But women’s publicity success has not been matched by success in the traditional political sense and this has contributed to an inflated perception of their failure. Further, intense media scrutiny has exposed relative novices to aggressive resistance from their political competitors. Baird argues that many women politicians were ‘pursued by their opponents not because they were women, but because they were potentially serious vote-pullers, electoral drawcards with the kind of popularity party strategists fantasise about’ (p. 271). When these women failed to live up to unrealistic expectations the media set for them, the media’s disappointment was often expressed as emotionally charged criticism, which was exaggerated by the women’s high profiles. Thus, a woman’s fall from grace seemed devastating. Baird observes, ‘the bias that frequently emerged in the media made their transgressions grotesque, their mistakes almost sinister’ (p. 4).

  Drawing on a solid body of evidence including interviews with women politicians past and present, and substantially informed by her recent doctoral thesis in the History Department at the University of Sydney, Media Tarts is a very satisfying discussion of the media’s reporting of women in politics during recent Australia history. Baird considers the evolution of attitudes toward women politicians and gives a brief history of how they have been portrayed in the media and how they presented themselves publicly. Media Tarts reflects usefully on social attitudes toward women in public life; on the distance between the opinions of media and political elites and those of the general public; and on the relationship between reporters and politicians. Baird argues that the media is often blamed when a woman fails to succeed in politics when the greater enemy was rivalry in the political ranks. For instance, on the fall of Carmen Lawrence in the wake of the Penny Easton affair, Baird says, ‘While the media pursued Lawrence fiercely over the story, it was her political opponents, in both the Labor and Liberal parties, who did the most damage’ (p. 227). Baird’s unstated implication is that many in the media don’t understand well enough how the representative politics can work to distort the public will. Of one case study she observes ‘The key question about the wax and wane of the Bronwyn Bishop phenomenon, posed by many journalists at the time, is whether her influence was exaggerated by the press’ (p. 38).
  Women’s publicity success has not been matched by success in the traditional political sense.

  Some readers may find Baird’s advice to political aspirants self evident, others may find it wearisome and acquiescent. Like the wisdom that while a woman may not deserve to be assaulted because of the way she is dressed, a sensible woman will dress conservatively to ensure her safety; Baird argues that women must represent themselves responsibly in the media to ensure their political success. Political culture has developed to admit those who fit the image we traditionally associate with men. <> that <> To do so women must hide those aspects of themselves that the political culture has traditionally eschewed.

  But can this conservative approach achieve wider goals for women than simple participation? Some feminists have criticised the ‘critical mass’ thesis that Baird relies on to bring about change. For these critics, this will not be enough to change things for women. Mary Crooks, Executive Director of the Victorian Women’s Trust, has said ‘we have to elect women who are not the Condoleezza Rices of this world’ (2004), implying here that Rice does not use her political position to improve women’s position. Marian Sawer (2000) has also argued that increasing the number of women in parliament is necessary but not sufficient. However, Sawer also points to evidence that female candidates are more likely to engage with women’s policy issues and raise these in parliament, which gives some support to Baird’s critical mass thesis. In general, Baird is not insensitive to this debate, but she doesn’t examine closely the relationship between how women are represented in the media and their political actions.
  Political culture has developed to admit those who fit the image we traditionally associate with men.

  More robust is Baird’s treatment of the relationship between media reporting and broader social attitudes to women. She examines how the media has covered several women politicians and argues that its representations of these women have conformed to formulaic accounts which she labels ‘frames’. Baird shows how the frames through which the media has analysed women in politics have mirrored the evolving wider debate about women’s changing role in society. In the 1970s, for instance, ‘Articles on women in politics … often followed a formula of the ‘battle’ between contesting ideologies about women: should they work or stay at home?’ (p. 51). Baird shows how many women politicians at this time publicly rejected feminism while privately acting in accordance with many of its goals. She theorises that this contradictory attitude was both a response, and a further stimulus, to the popular backlash against feminism. Here Baird confirms Sarah Madison’s account of the backlash against the women’s movement, which Madison says has generated ‘unpleasant and erroneous images of feminists, particularly in the mainstream media’ (2004, p. 46). According to Baird, women politicians have been complicit in creating such imagery.

  Baird argues that, over time, different frames have informed the media’s representation of women politicians. In Media Tarts she describes three such frames: the ‘Steel Sheilas’, the ‘Superstar Housewives’ and the ‘Cover Girls’. In the Steel Sheilas media frame, stories compared women, including Senators Bronwyn Bishop and Margaret Guilfoyle, with Britain’s first and only woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Articles depict these women, to varying degrees, as possessing Thatcher’s toughness, her supposed stylish good looks, her rejection of feminism, and her seemingly hypocritical reverence for a traditional role for women in the private sphere. The contradiction between the Steel Sheilas’ advocacy of the virtue of housewifery and their personal adoption of a demanding professional career reflected the evolving debate about the nature of women’s contribution to public life. Baird says that ‘While expectations of leadership sprang initially from a belief that a woman was unnaturally steely, or masculine, their difference to men was later considered an asset’ (p. 46). Regardless of their political experience, each was touted as a serious contender to be Australia’s first woman prime minister. Baird argues that the Steel Sheilas typically disappointed the media because they failed to deliver on the unrealistic expectation of their future leadership.
  Some women politicians have publicly rejected feminism while privately acting in accordance with its goals.

  In the ‘Superstar Housewives’ frame, the media depicted politicians, including MPs Ros Kelly and a reluctant Joan Child, performing housework and as having the qualities traditionally associated with women as well as the strength associated with men. Baird claims that many women politicians used this frame to present themselves as more virtuous than men while being just as capable, and so, by default, superior due to their gender. When the Superstar Housewives failed to clean up the political culture as promised but instead replicated the behaviour of their male colleagues, they were acutely criticised by many journalists. Nevertheless, the social discussion that coincided with the portrayal of women as Steel Sheilas and Superstar Housewives contributed to widening the understanding of women’s possible contribution to politics. For instance, while initially ‘The role of the housewife was generally regarded as a poor qualification for political life’ (p. 49), it was later argued to give women ‘a perspective that men lacked, and was vital to the proper running of the country’ (p. 49).

  Baird illustrates how women politicians were also framed in the media as Cover Girls, sometimes dressed in evening or fashion attire, often photographed in social contexts and with a focus on their physical appearance. Younger politicians such as South Australian MP Barbara Wiese and Senator Natasha Stott Despoja were portrayed in this way but so too were Cheryl Kernot and Pauline Hanson. Baird claims the media’s desire to dress politicians up as Cover Girls was matched by these politicians’ hunger for publicity. She reports that Stott Despoja ‘once wrote that women should “manipulate the media” in order to get their voices heard’ (p. 137). This portrayal was important both for differentiating women from the traditional and somewhat negative stereotype of politicians as elite and aloof, and as a way of showing women to be multi-dimensional. This frame reflects a wider discussion about how women can be social and sexual beings as well as mothers, housewives, and serious professional contributors, but the frivolous portrayal of women politicians in the media made it easy for their colleagues to label them vacuous. Although they didn’t necessarily lose the support of the wider public, some lost the support of their colleagues and their self-confidence, and so their careers collapsed. The professional decline that many of these women experienced was sufficiently spectacular to scare the new generation into adopting the neutral media profile that Media Tarts advocates.
  The public’s reaction to women in politics differs from the reactions of both the media and political elites.

  Contrary to the contention of one hostile review, Media Tarts does not ‘subscribe to the idea of female politicians as victims’ (Walsh 2004, p. 73). Rather Baird argues that women have contributed to their own downfalls; they ‘have exploited the stereotypes and superficiality of press coverage for their own gain, a fact which is now recognised by journalists and politicians, but rarely by feminist academics and commentators’ (p. 8). And she points out much the general public’s reaction to these women differs from the reactions of both the media and political elites. While women in politics have been attacked by their peers and labelled failures by the media, opinion poll data has not shown them to be electoral liabilities (MacKerras 1980); indeed there is some evidence to the contrary (Curtin & Sexton 2004; Whip 2003). Baird concludes that ‘The female meteor syndrome – where women flame then fade to black – has demonstrated a clear gap between the expectations and judgements of the press and the public’ (p. 229). This gap adds weight to her advice that women politicians need not court media publicity in order to achieve success. Indeed, the opposite might be true. Given this, we should examine more closely the extent and nature of media power in the political context? Baird’s case studies demonstrate that disproportionate publicity and a high media profile cannot deliver women real political power, so it will be interesting to see whether keeping a low media profile can.
  REFERENCES

  Curtin, J. & Sexton, K. 2004, Selecting and electing women to the house of representatives: Progress at last?, paper presented to the Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, University of Adelaide, 1 October.

  Crooks, M. 2004, ‘Women politicians don’t fight for women’, Media Release, Victorian Women’s Trust, 13 June.

  Madison, S. 2004, ‘A part of living feminism: Intergenerational feminism in a working class area’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, vol. 8 nos. 1 & 2, pp. 38–53.

  MacKerras, M. 1980, ‘Do women candidates lose votes? Further evidence’, Australian Quarterly, v. 52, Summer, pp. 450–455.

  Sawer, M. 2000, ‘Parliamentary representation of women: From discourses of justice to strategies of accountability’, International Political Science Review, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 361–379.

  Walsh, K. A. 2004, ‘Books extra – Media Tarts: how the Australian press frames female politicians’, Sun Herald, 12 September, p. 73.

  Whip, R. 2003, ‘The 1996 Australian federal election and its aftermath: A case for equal gender representation’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 18, no. 40, pp. 73–97.

  Shelly Savage is a doctoral student and lecturer in the Discipline of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include public policy, Australian politics, media and public relations.

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