Daisy Goodwin

When I was eighteen I went to Cambridge University to study history. MY first assignment was Queen Victoria and the media. I went to the library to consult her Diaries. She wrote sixty two million words in her life time and as I pulled out the first leather bound volume I felt overwhelmed by its size and weight. But then it fell open at the entry for 3rd Nov 1839, ” I saw me dearest Albert who was all wet in his white cashmere breeches with nothing on underneath.” As I laughed out loud, the other readers looked at me in disapproval. Queen Victoria, I decided then, was not the boot faced old bag with a bonnet I had imagined, but a woman after my own heart.

All my novels have been set in the Victorian era: The American Heiress is about a dollar princess called Cora Cash who marriesan English duke; The Fortune Hunter is the story of Sisi, the beautiful Austrian Empress who came to England to hunt – in the novel Sisi meets Victoria. I enjoyed writing this encounter so much – Victoria”s voice came so easily to me, that I decided that my next next novel would be about the young Victoria. But as I started writing it, I thought it would make a great tv drama, which is how I ended up writing the PBS Masterpiece series Victoria, as well as my novel Victoria, a novel of a young Queen.

When I am not immersed in the nineteenth century, I live in London with three dogs, two daughters and a husband.