A Good Biography: An Uncommon Woman by Hannah Pakula

Art consumers don’t realize it, but their judgement of art falls into four distinct categories. Instead of the binary ‘good’ or ‘bad’, the quality of art is best measured like so: good and memorable; good but not memorable; bad but memorable; and finally bad and unmemorable.

The first category consists of art that changes civilization forever. Think the Mona Lisa, Hamilton, The Beatles, and so on. This art is so powerful that it changes your life. It is a small, very privileged group. The last category, bad and unmemorable, is art that most people attempt in their lifetime. All art in this category will remain nameless.

The middle two categories are the most interesting. ‘Bad but memorable’ is a rare bird. Another way of describing it is ‘so bad it’s good’. Art in this category violates every norm of its medium by blasting itself to the bottom of your brainstem. Perhaps the most (in)famous example is ‘The Room’, a 2003 amateur movie so incredibly terrible that it developed its own cult following celebrating its terribleness. ‘The Room’ is impossible to forget.

The final category, good but not memorable, can be found in the subject of this book review.

This is An Uncommon Woman by Hannah Pakula.

Summary

If you think your family is complicated, then just wait until you meet this poor woman. The subtitle gives away the drama: daughter of Queen Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia (later united Germany) and mother to Kaiser Wilhelm II. For this biography, Hannah Pakula gives this easily overlooked figure the royal treatment she ought to have had in her lifetime. Vicky, as her parents called her, was groomed by her father Prince Albert to marry the Crown Prince of Prussia; Albert’s goal was to create a liberal, united Germany. However, this plan went terribly wrong when Prince Albert died young, sending Queen Victoria into a state of decades-long mourning. Worse still, as a foreigner in their court, the conservative Prussians treated Vicky with contempt and suspicion. Then, her liberal husband, known as Fritz, developed cancer just as his conservative father began dying. He ruled briefly before Fritz and Vicky’s autocratic son, Willy, became Kaiser. The dream of a liberal, constitutional monarchy in Germany was dead.

Frustrating Vicky’s efforts to inject more liberalism into Prussian society was the wily political mastermind Otto von Bismarck. The autocratic and conservative Bismarck did everything in his power to thwart her ambitions and ruthlessly built his own united Germany. (For Americans who have no interest in the country until the Nazis came along, Germany was never a united country like it is today prior to 1870.) Bismarck’s vision had no interest in the toothless and unmanly constitutional monarchy which Vicky hailed from

Also causing Vicky problems in Prussia was her eldest son, whom the family called Willy. Quite literally from the moment of his birth, which was performed with the usual 19th century barbarism, Willy struggled and suffered from an enormous inferiority complex. His left arm was useless from birth due to nerve issues and incompetent treatment. His profound insecurities and arrogance manifested in an ugly personality when the world met him as Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Pros

Pakula’s biography of Vicky is an inspired choice for examining 19th-century Europe. Unlike the binary alliances of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War in the 20th century, politics from the earlier century were trickier and constantly shifting. As the daughter of Queen Victoria, Europe’s strongest naval power after victory in the Napoleonic wars, Vicky’s marriage mattered significantly.

Also helpful is Pakula giving the reader a crash course on the founding of Germany. The story is hideously complicated and easily misunderstood. Vicky was at the center of these events, and so made for an interesting protagonist. An easier biographical subject would be Kaiser Wilhelm II or Otto von Bismarck, but books about those two probably would not show the true cost of their actions on individual people. Bismarck comes off as a psychopath in this book and Wilhelm insufferable, which is exactly how Vicky would have experienced them.

Also covered nicely is Vicky’s relationship with her husband, Fritz who momentarily became Friedrich III before succumbing to cancer. Unusually for the time, Fritz and Vicky were a happy couple who truly loved each other. It was a refreshing focus when most royal relationships are built on misery and conflict.

Another subject looming in the background is the outbreak of World War I. Vicky died thirteen years before the war began, but the long-term consequences of Germany’s policies subtly crop up every now and again. The infamous secret treaties and cataclysmic diplomatic moves made by Wilhelm (which resulted in the polarized alliances that eventually went to war in 1914) are particularly well covered.

These are all positives for the book, so why am I lumping it in that unloved category ‘good but not memorable’?

Cons

The book checks all the necessary boxes for good art. It is written clearly, researched immaculately, and presented in the correct, chronological order. That being said, there are a couple of problems holding the book back. Problems which, fittingly or ironically, are quite close to what Vicky struggled with in her lifetime.

Namely, Vicky disappears from the book for several crucial chapters in the middle as the blood-soaked politics of Otto von Bismarck overwhelm the scene (and the continent of Europe). Vicky, unfortunately for women of the period, did not have the influence she ought to have had. As such, events where she should be front and center are instead overpowered by more powerful men like Bismarck and the various Kaisers. Vicky’s charitable work, her relationship with her children and other work she did, often get buried in the mix. If this were a biography of Bismarck, then fine, but a main character disappearing from her own book is always a problem. I struggled to understand why her eldest son hated her so much. Was it simply insecurity because of his left arm or did Vicky have a nastier side than what was presented here?

Also problematic is Pakula’s frequent use of block quotes when discussing letters between Queen Victoria and Vicky. As both women used wonky spelling and weird punctuation, having these letters in block quotes requires more concentration than the general reader would be willing to tolerate. This is more of a ‘literature’ problem than a ‘history’ problem, as long blocks of descriptive text are less enjoyable than scenes, dialogue, and events.

Conclusion

In my opinion, the problems with this book do not outweigh the good. However, I recognize the general American reader might struggle to figure out why this book is worth their time. (The answer, of course, is that you expand your horizons of knowledge and break the stereotype of Americans being semi-literate bumpkins who only care about money and baseball.) Vicky was never the most consequential person in Prussia/Germany, so her helplessness is just as frustrating for the reader as it was for her in life.

The book is certainly ‘good’ in the sense that it is produced by someone of the highest competence, but struggles to be memorable or life-altering in the manner of Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton.

Maybe this review will change that.