Motherhood for Queen Victoria has been depicted as grim, 'animalistic and unecstatic'. But these are not the images that emerge from a reading of her journal from her first years of maternity. Motherhood for the 21 year-old Queen was sudden and complex, but she delighted in its womanliness. She had revelled in her queenship, but the public and work aspects of sovereignty were challenged by ninteenth-century ideals of femininity. Marriage to her cousin, Prince Albert, with its promise of the fulfillment of passionate love, had its frustrations as she tried to juggle wifely submissiveness with her sovereignty. Simultaneously, Albert sought to appropriate masculine roles to establish himself in the court. Her immediate pregnancy in effect facilitated this and impinged on her queenship. She experienced a sense of loss of control- over her physical body, her royal body and her mortality. But in 1841, motherhood exemplified her womanliness and wifeliness, gave her pleasure and could co-exist with her queenship.
