Kate Hubbard has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 1★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Serving Victoria.
Serving Victoria
Summary
During her 63-year reign, Queen Victoria gathered around herself a household dedicated to her service. For some, royal employment was the defining experience of their lives; for others it came as an unwelcome duty or as a prelude to greater things. Serving Victoria follows the lives of six members of her household, from the governess to the royal children, from her maid of honor to her chaplain and her personal physician. Drawing on their letters and diaries - many hitherto unpublished - Serving Victoria offers a unique insight into the Victorian court, with all its frustrations and absurdities, as well as the queen herself, sitting squarely at its center. Seen through the eyes of her household as she traveled among Windsor, Osborne, and Balmoral, and to the French and Belgian courts, Victoria emerges as more vulnerable, more emotional, more selfish, more comical, than the austere figure depicted in her famous portraits. We see a woman who was prone to fits of giggles, who wept easily and often, who gobbled her food and shrank from confrontation but insisted on controlling the lives of those around her. We witness her extraordinary and debilitating grief at the death of her husband, Albert, and her sympathy toward the tragedies that afflicted her household.
©2012 Kate Hubbard (P)2020 Tantor
Devices and Desires
Summary
The critically acclaimed author of Serving Victoria brilliantly illuminates the life of the little-known Bess of Hardwick - next to Queen Elizabeth I, the richest and most powerful woman in 16th-century England. Aided by a quartet of judicious marriages and a shrewd head for business, Bess of Hardwick rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most respected and feared countesses in Elizabethan England - an entrepreneur who built a family fortune, created glorious houses - the last and greatest built as a widow in her 70s - and was deeply involved in matters of the court, including the custody of Mary Queen of Scots. While Bess cultivated many influential courtiers, she also collected numerous enemies. Her embittered fourth husband once called her a woman of “devices and desires”, while 19th-century male historians portrayed her as a monster - "a woman of masculine understanding and conduct, proud, furious, selfish and unfeeling." In the 21st century, she has been neutered by female historians who recast her as a soft-hearted sort, much maligned, and misunderstood. As Kate Hubbard reveals, the truth of this highly accomplished woman lies somewhere in between: ruthless and scheming, Bess was sentimental and affectionate as well. Hubbard draws on more than 230 of Bess' letters, including correspondence with the queen and her councilors, fond (and furious) missives between her husbands and children, and notes sharing titillating court gossip. The result is a rich, compelling portrait of a true feminist icon centuries ahead of her time - a complex, formidable, and decidedly modern woman captured in full as never before. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 Kate Hubbard (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers