LONDON.- A biography of Queen Victoria, filled with her handwritten corrections and annotations, will be offered for sale at Sotheby’s in London on 24 November with an estimate of £10,000-15,000.

The author, Agnes Strickland, was already an established historian when she was commissioned to write the biography to mark the occasion of Victoria’s wedding. However, despite the effusive tone of the writing and the favourable portrait of the Queen the book presented, the 21-year-old Queen was not best impressed.. Over a hundred pages found disfavour, with many paragraphs marked and annotated tersely "not true", "quite false", and even "nonsense". On other pages she has struck through the offending details completely.

The Queen then returned her marked-up copy to the author. So upset with the offense that the publication had caused, Strickland was rumoured to have had all the remaining copies of the book pulped. Her younger sister, Jane, recalled: "The sale was stopped and where ever Miss Strickland was able to do so, she bought in those already out and destroyed them”. As a result the title is a rarity in itself and this is the only copy that has appeared at auction in recent years.

The book made such an impression that even nearly 100 years later (in 1932) George V contacted Strickland’s descendants with a request to read the biography that had so enraged his grandmother.

No error was seemingly too small to attract Victoria's attention. Names, dates and places are amended, and in one case, she even corrects Strickland's description "her fair hair was simply parted" to "in plaits". In particular, Strickland's imagined childhood meetings between Albert and Victoria attracted repeated correction.

Often, it was Strickland's tendency for exaggeration which met with disdain: the note "the Queen only gave 1 or 2 concerts of 100 people" appears next to a particularly gushing account of "her majesty's first soirée, upwards of two thousand gentlemen were present and the crowd was so tremendous that diamond buckles were broken or lost..." A description of Princess Sophia Matilda as "beautiful as an angel, and graceful as a nymph, the very beau ideal of a royal lady..." is dismissed as simply "absurd".


The book will be sold on 24 November as part of Sotheby’s “Library of an English Bibliophile sale” - a collection of over 100 first-edition books, all containing inscriptions form their authors. Collected over 40 years, they provide a glimpse into the forgotten narratives behind over 300 years of literary production. With individual estimates ranging from £700 – £150,000, they’re together expected to fetch over £5 million sale.