KALEIDOSCOPIC PANORAMA IN VICTORIA HOLT’S THE QUEEN’S CONFESSION

Abstract

Victoria Holt is a writer par excellence who is renowned for her Gothic and Historic fiction. The novel chosen for study, The Queen’s Confession is a fictional autobiography of the most famous monarch of France, Marie Antoinette, Dauphine and wife of Louis XVI. The story lays bare her joyous childhood days in Vienna and traces her evolution as the last Queen of France, who in the lap of splendour and luxury became a pleasure- seeking lovely woman whose future was doomed. She was one of the greatest women of her times, who transformed the opulent and plush Palace of Versailles into her playground. She has her own inglorious moments as she is always looked down as a foreigner and is caught in the web of personal agony and inexperience. Envied by all for her affluence, she became indifferent and deaf to the cries of the common people, which paved the way for the outbreak of the French Revolution. The novel culminates in the death of this passionate royal. Holt unravels this biographical fiction, which at once is also a memoir and also attains the perspective of an epistolary novel as she adopts all these literary devices to support her story and knit it as closely as possible with history and reality.