Queen Anne
Patroness of Arts
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
As the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne (1665-1714) received the education thought proper for a princess, reading plays and poetry in English and French while learning dancing, singing, acting, drawing, and instrumental music. As an adult, she played the guitar and the harpsichord, danced regularly, and took a connoisseur's interest in all the arts.
In this comprehensive interdisciplinary biography, James Winn tells the story of Anne's life in new breadth and detail, and in unprecedented cultural context. Winn shows how poets, painters, and musicians used the works they made for Anne to send overt and covert political messages to the queen, the court, the church, and Parliament. Their works also illustrate the pathos of Anne's personal life: the loss of her mother when she was six, her troubled relations with her father and her sister (James II and Mary II), and her own doomed efforts to produce an heir. Her eighteen pregnancies produced only one child who lived past infancy; his death at the age of eleven, mourned by poets, was a blow from which Anne never fully recovered. Her close friendship with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, a topic of scabrous ballads and fictions, ended in bitter discord; the death of her husband in 1708 left her emotionally isolated; and the wrangling among her chief ministers hastened her death.
Richly illustrated with visual and musical examples, Queen Anne draws on works by a wide array of artists-among them the composer George Frideric Handel, the poet Alexander Pope, the painter Godfrey Kneller, and the architect Christopher Wren-to shed new light on Anne's life and reign. This is the definitive biography of Queen Anne.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winn (John Dryden and His World) reconstructs the life story of Queen Anne (1665-1714) through impressive insight garnered from correspondence, poetry, music, and artwork created before and during her reign, which began in 1702. Winn is an ace at picking up on subtleties in the period's music and poetry, giving readers an feel for the political and religious turmoil that infected Anne's court. While much of the book focuses on the music and art created in her lifetime, Winn also points to several of the queen's relationships and their influence on her court. Perhaps the most passionate and volatile of these was with Sarah, duchess of Marlborough. Anne's intense love for Sarah kept her near and present throughout most of Anne's reign, and much of her anxiety stemmed from her friend's opposing political beliefs. Though Winn's knowledge of his subject is deep, his lack of selectivity and the steady piling up of evidence works in inverse proportion to the book's enjoyability. However, his writing and commentary, along with the musical samples found on the accompanying website, bring the queen's history to life.
