A fatherless girl grows up a virtual prisoner in the shabby backwater of Kensington Palace, despised by her relations, bullied and insulted by her foolish mother's evil genius. Only the core of stubbornness in her nature sustains her as she waits for the day of deliverance - the day she will become Queen of England.

She is Victoria; this is her story, recorded in her own words in the last troubled year of her life.

With humanity and humour the Queen Empress of half the world looks back over eighty crowded years, remembering domestic crisis and public triumph, war, revolution and the fall of dynasties; remembering most of all the great and abiding love that illuminated every aspect of her life.

This is the autobiography Queen Victoria might have written, and reveals the private woman behind the public mask - quick tempered, proud and incurably honest; shy, vulnerable and always, indefatigably, amused.