Princess Beatrice gave up her private life, her health and most of her happiness in order to be the secretary, confidante and companion of her widowed mother. Starting with the death of her father, Prince Albert, when she was only four years old, her life was a constant reminder of funereal gloom. As her older sisters married and moved away, Princess Beatrice became the Queen's slave in most matters public and private. Such was the Queen's paranoia that her youngest daughter might grow up and want a life of her own, she forbade all talk of marriage in front of the Princess, and punished the girl by not speaking to her for eight months when she dared to fall in love and announced her wish to wed. The marriage was only allowed to go forward, and the Princess forgiven, when the couple agreed to live with the Queen for their married life, with very limited travel (their honeymoon lasted only five days, and the Queen visited for two of them).

I don't think I'd realized just how selfish Queen Victoria was until I read this meticulously researched volume. Princess Beatrice was a far more forgiving and patient woman than I could have ever been, and I veer between being in awe of her, and pitying her.

Matthew Dennison's writing style takes a while to get used to - sometimes he moves back and forth in eras and you have to go back in order to determine just what time frame he's referring to. The text is at times dangerously close to "scholarly" and for this alone I give the book four stars instead of five. I do recommend it, however, for the insights it gives into this complex, frustrating relationship.

beatrice was last child of queen victoria and prince albert.after her father death,beatrice became a emotional phsycial slave to a self center and demanding mother .she was not allow to from freidship with people her age or talk of marriage .beatrice did finally find love with prince henry but had to fight her mother who did not talk to her for 6 month to married the man she love.lucky prince henry could put up with his demanding mother-in-law.they share happy marriage for 10 years and 4 childern until his death.beatrice return to being her mother secretary/companion until queen death.even after that she was in charge of her mother papers until her own death.

Princess Beatrice was the youngest and least well known of the nine children of Queen Victoria. Born just four years before the death of her father Prince Albert, she did not experience the full rigour of an upbringing and education under her father's control, the only one of the family to escape what seems to modern eyes less raising a child than overwhelming it. Beatrice also seems to have avoided her parents' well known tendency to over criticize and over correct their other children. But Beatrice, as the youngest child, was the one chosen by her incredibly self-centered mother to be an eternal comfort and assistant after Albert's death and the marriage of her siblings. Forced into the role of secretary/confidante (and at times psychologist) to her mother when barely out of her teens, Beatrice developed a personality which was quiet, patient, and undemanding throughout the years during which her peers were getting married and raising families. She seems to have rebelled against her mother only once, when she fell in love with and insisted on marrying Prince Henry of Battenberg, who fortunately was also patient enough to agree to be part of Queen Victoria's household rather than establishing his own independent life. Prince Henry died after a decade of marriage, and Beatrice continued to be Victoria's secretary/companion until the Queen died in 1901. Even then Beatrice was not free from her mother, because she had been given the task of editing/censoring the Queen's journals, a task which took her many years and probably resulted in the loss of much valuable material about Victoria's true thoughts and activities, since Beatrice loyally destroyed the originals after making her copies.

This nice, self-effacing lady would not have merited a biography had she not been born royal, but its good to have this one because it sheds light on a life which was lived in the shadow of a more forceful personality. Matthew Dennison writes well, if somewhat archaically (I do not recall running across the word "munificent" even once in a modern book, let alone twice!) There are many photos and reproductions of portraits that I had never seen before, and there are some good descriptions of Beatrice's four children: three sons who were to be even more obscure than their mother (one was a hemophiliac, a tragic reminder of the curse genetics placed on Victoria's descendants) and a daughter who became Queen of Spain (and the mother of two hemophiliac sons.) The Last Princess will make an excellent addition to any collection of royal biographies.

This is pretty much what you'd expect - but no new information on the princess. Nothing I didn't know before, no new pictures I haven't seen before. Slow reading at times - I had to make myself finish it. A good effort, but nothing spectacular, and the writing style is dry and not very exciting. Princess Beatrice needs a good bio about her - but this isn't it.