Buckley, Veronica

views updated

Buckley, Veronica

PERSONAL: Born in New Zealand; married Philipp Blom (a writer).

ADDRESSES: Home—Paris, France. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Fourth Estate, 10 E. 53rd St., 7th Fl., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Writer. Worked variously in music and in the oil industry.

WRITINGS:

Christina, Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric (biography), Fourth Estate (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: In Christina, Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric Veronica Buckley presents the life story of the unconventional queen, who has born in 1626 and inherited the throne from her father, Gustavus Adolphus II, before the age of six. Among Christina's most notorious attributes were her ambiguous sexuality—midwives mistook her for a boy at birth and she often wore men's clothing—; her intelligence (she was tutored by René Descartes); her greed (she used money from the Swedish treasury to support her lavish spending); her love of art and culture (she stole the art collection of Emperor Rudolf II of Prague while helping negotiate the peace treaty that ended the Thirty Years' War); her erratic leadership (she abdicated the Swedish throne at the age of twenty-eight); and her unpredictable behavior (she changed religions and bounced around Europe in an attempt to find power and prestige outside of Sweden).

Reactions to Buckley's account of Christina's fascinating life were mostly favorable. A contributor to Publishers Weekly observed that "Buckley presents a wide-ranging, entertaining exploration," while a critic for Kirkus Reviews commented that the biography is written "with considerable polish—and an occasional tilt to the baroque that befits its subject." And, while New Statesman contributor Jerry Brotton felt that Buckley "too often resorts to anachronistic, novelistic speculation," Spectator critic Eric Christiansen believed that Buckley's portrait of Christina "is written with unwavering intelligence and flashes of wit."