Last Days of Glory

From inside front cover: Queen Victoria's death in January 1901 shook Britain to its core, and reverberated not just throughout the Commonwealth but around the world. She was a woman in her eighties, and yet it seems no one could contemplate the end of a reign that had lasted so long. Most could not remember a time when she was not Queen, and the very stability of everyday life seemed to depend on her regnecy. The anxiety of the government and the royal family about the prospect of the Queen's death was such that the news of her illness was deliberately concealed from the public for more than a week. ... [This] is the definitive account of those last 23 days in Janaury 1901 when Victoria traveled to Osborne House to die. The momentous reaction to the Queen's passing attached to it more signifigance and a greater sense of change than the turn of the century had carried just a year earlier. ... Rennell presents us with a series of resonant and absorbing snapshots of a fading empire at the end of the Victorian Age. His narrative captures a nation coping with change, balancing a comfortable nostalgia with the arrival of a new order.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.