Lucinda Hawksley

The secrets of Queen Victoria’s sixth child, Princess Louise, may be destined to remain hidden forever. What was so dangerous about this artistic, tempestuous royal that her life has been documented more by rumour and gossip than hard facts? I first came across Princess Louise’s name when researching my biographies of Lizzie Siddal and Kate Perugini, I wondered who this art-loving princess really was. When I started to investigate, often thwarted by inexplicable secrecy, I discovered a fascinating woman, modern before her time, whose story has been shielded for years from public view.

Louise was a sculptor and painter, friend to the Pre-Raphaelites and a keen member of the Aesthetic movement. The most feisty of the Victorian princesses, she kicked against her mother’s controlling nature and remained fiercely loyal to her brothers – especially the sickly Leopold and the much-maligned Bertie. She sought out other unconventional women, including Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and George Eliot, and campaigned for education and health reform and for the rights of women. She battled with her indomitable mother for permission to practice the ‘masculine’ art of sculpture and go to art college – and in doing so became the first British princess to attend a public school.

The rumours of Louise’s colourful love life persist even today, with hints of love affairs dating as far back as her teenage years, and notable scandals included an illegitimate baby with her brother’s tutor and rumoured romantic entanglements with her married sculpting tutor Joseph Edgar Boehm and her sister Princess Beatrice’s handsome husband, Liko. True to rebellious form, she refused all royal suitors and became the first member of the royal family to marry a commoner since the sixteenth century. “Spirited and lively, The Mystery of Princess Louise is richly packed with arguments, intrigues, scandals and secrets, and is a vivid portrait of a princess desperate to escape her inheritance.”

Lucinda Hawksley is an author, art historian and public speaker, with a special interest in literature and art from the 19th and early 20th centuries and in the history of London. She is also an award-winning travel writer with a love of the environment: cetaceans are one of her passions and she is a volunteer speaker for the Whales & Dolphins Conservation Society.

As a great great great granddaughter of Charles and Catherine Dickens, Lucinda has grown up with an interest in her family history. For the last decade she has been a Patron of the Charles Dickens Museum in London – She has also recently been made Patron of the Norwegian Pickwick Club!