Merle

Interesting subject, but I fall into the camp that found Fraser's writing to be very dry, which makes this quite a long book. It seems like a substantial amount of it is undigested research - the royal family went to such-and-such a palace to celebrate such-and-such an occasion - maybe because it was intended to be more of an academic biography that simply records facts, but as a non-academic what I'm looking for in biographies is meaning. With all these quoted letters from the young princesses to their governesses apologizing for bad behavior, for instance: what do they actually tell us about the princesses and their lives and culture? What sort of behavior were the girls getting up to, and were some less obedient than others? Did they write the letters of their own volition or because another governess told them to? Without any of this context - which Fraser doesn't provide - quoting a few of these letters doesn't actually tell us anything. Isn't the historian's job to sort through all this primary source material and sift narrative and meaning out of it to share with the reader? Maybe I'm asking for more hand-holding than the type of writing Fraser aspired to here is meant to provide, but at any rate I quit at page 100. I debated a lot whether to continue though, since there is a lot of interesting information here and the six princesses seem to have had interesting lives.