Word: woodham
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Just look at the list. In American politics and history we have James Thomas Flexner on Washington, Dumas Malone on Jefferson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on Robert Kennedy and James MacGregor Burns on Franklin Roosevelt. The British have given us Elizabeth Jenkins on Elizabeth I, Cecil Woodham-Smith on Queen Victoria, Philip Magnus on Gladstone and Edward VII, and Robert Blake on Benjamin Disraeli. In literature there are treasures from both sides of the Atlantic. Richard Ellmann's Joyce, George Painter's Proust and Leon Edel's James are the chief prizes, but there are many other jewels...
Died. Cecil Woodham-Smith, 80, British historian and biographer who combined assiduous research and graceful writing to make the 19th century come alive; of heart disease; in London. A former advertising copywriter and novelist, Mrs. Woodham-Smith knew so much about Florence Nightingale that in 1942 she was urged to write her biography by a publisher friend. She spent six years working on her book, which earned unanimous critical acclaim. She also wrote about the charge of the Light Brigade (The Reason Why, 1953), the Irish famine and the early years of Queen Victoria. Of the long hours she spent...
...Cecil Woodham-Smith's Victoria is the first of two books. It takes the sovereign's life as far as the death of Albert, her prince consort, in 1861. The author had access to the Royal Family Archives at Windsor, and her rich effort at historical reconstruction is one of the finest biographies in English since George Painter's classic Marcel Proust. It is also an engrossing love story. Woodham-Smith is a historian, not a Crawfie. Her romance, moreover, is told without sentimentality and is set against the forbidding complexities of 19th century European politics...
Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was a careerist whose training and education had for years been directed toward one end: marriage with Victoria. How the union proceeded forms one of the most entertaining strands in Mrs. Woodham-Smith's book. Victoria had seen him before, but she first fell in love with this blue-and-blond Parsifal in 1839. "It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert-who is beautiful," she observed in her diary. Their correspondence from the beginning was a model of Victorian decorum and devotion ("Never, never did I think I could be loved...
...century, from the revolutions of 1848 to Britain's brave bungling in the Crimea. But when Albert died in 1861-of typhoid fever, from the fetid drains of Windsor Castle-she was left in an almost unimaginable isolation. "The words on all lips," runs the last sentence of Woodham-Smith's book, "the feelings in all hearts were: 'What is going to happen now to the poor Queen?'" One waits for Volume...