Modern Queenship

This book explores queenship in the modern era in ways that highlight the emergence of individual queens as female leaders. The chapters revisit familiar figures like Marie-Antoinette and Queen Victoria alongside lesser-known queens such as Hortense of Holland, Greece’s Queen Amalia, and Empress Shöken. Emphasising female leadership and queenship, it concludes with Benazir Bhutto’s use of tropes of queenship. The volume examines how the queens showcased engaged with opportunities offered in the modern era with more or less success. That success depended on factors including spousal support, the health of the monarchic institution and the ways that these women engaged with and made use of the emerging mass media. Whether as queens regnant, consort or regent, the actions of queens such as Hortense and Isabel II of Spain, who failed to engage positively with the challenges of modernity, are shown to have been less well regarded by both contemporaries and history. Others, including Princess (Marie-) Caroline of Monaco, Romania’s Queen Elisabeth and Queen Aliya of Iraq, left legacies not only upon their own states but also on how queenship was expected to operate in a modern world. Marie-Antoinette, Queen Augusta and Crown Princess Victoria of Prussia and Queen Emma of the Netherlands are revealed to have been sophisticated politicians, while the UK’s Queen Victoria and Queen Mary were both active royal diplomats. In her engagement with the imagery associated with her working persona Carmen Sylva, Elisabeth of Romania was an effective mistress of mimesis, as were Empress Shöken and Princess Grace of Monaco. The chapters on Empress Zita and Benazir Bhutto focus on women negotiating styles of female leadership in republican contexts where popular expectations of monarchic conduct still had a significant mass impact. This volume effectively reveals how different queens operated to sustain monarchic institutions by reinventing the concept of what it meant to be a queen in the modern era.