Lord M.
Bestselling historical novel on Queen Victoria's first prime minister, and the scandalous wife he never stopped loving
On 20 June 1837, Victoria ascends the British throne at just eighteen. She discusses every step with Lord Melbourne, the prime minister who becomes a father figure to the young queen. In imagined diary entries from 1837 to 1840, Melbourne records her insecurities, her first political crisis, and finally her engagement to Albert, a loss he bears with stiff-upper-lip sadness.
Martijn Prins
Between the diaries, Melbourne looks back on his marriage to Lady Caroline Lamb: the wild girl he fell in love with, whose public affair with Lord Byron scandalised London (it was Caroline who called the poet ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’), and the fragile woman he stood by until her death.
The result is a double portrait of a statesman guiding a young queen, and of a man still grieving the woman he could not save. Based on extensive archival research, and written in elegant prose full of disarmingly candid dialogue, Lord M. captures the voice of a nineteenth-century gentleman with wit and tenderness.
By the author of In Lucia's Eyes, winner of the 2004 Libris Literature Prize and translated into more than twenty languages.
Based on letters and documents in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library; includes Caroline Lamb's own drawings.
In his afterword, Japin describes how, at sixteen, he saw Robert Bolt's film Lady Caroline Lamb over a dozen times – the start of a lifelong fascination.
