Georgina Battiscombe was a British biographer, specialising mainly in lives from the Victorian era.
11 Facts About Georgina Battiscombe
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Georgina Battiscombe was born Esther Georgina Harwood, the elder daughter of George Harwood, a former clergyman, Liberal Member of Parliament for his home town of Bolton, master cotton spinner, and an author and barrister.
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Georgina Battiscombe's family had a political bent; her maternal grandfather, Sir Alfred Hopkinson, KC, three uncles, and her stepfather, John Murray, all became MPs.
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Georgina Battiscombe was educated at St Michael's School, Oxford, and at Lady Margaret Hall, and once considered a political career herself.
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Georgina Battiscombe's best known books were biographies of the Victorian romantic novelist Charlotte Mary Yonge ; Catherine Gladstone, the wife of Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone ; English churchman John Keble ; and Alexandra of Denmark.
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One of the reasons Georgina Battiscombe wrote about Queen Alexandra was that she and Alexandra both had the same form of deafness, otosclerosis.
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Georgina Battiscombe was very deaf for a large part of her life, until surgery and a hearing aid corrected this.
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Georgina Battiscombe said that her experience gave her "some understanding of Alexandra's predicament".
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Georgina Battiscombe thought that many royal biographies are factually incorrect, and that "so often the unfortunate royalties do not even receive common politeness from those who write about them".
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Georgina Battiscombe wrote biographies of Christina Rossetti and Shaftesbury, and her other titles include Two on Safari ; English Picnics ; Reluctant Pioneer: The Life of Elizabeth Wordsworth ; The Spencers of Althorp ; and Winter Song, a book of poems.
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Georgina Battiscombe became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964.