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by John Van Der Kiste (Editor)
Alice's compassionate nursing and charitable work reveal the costs of duty and loss in royal life.
Princess Alice was born in 1843, the second daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. She was a compassionate child and showed a keen interest in nursing from an early age. In 1862 she married Prince Louis of Hesse and the Rhine, a small German duchy soon to be impoverished by the defeat of its ally Austria in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War. During the conflict Alice worked tirelessly as a nurse, and in the aftermath she helped establish several charities in the duchy to support the most in need. Her health soon deteriorated due to overwork and she never fully recovered from the tragic death of her two-year-old son Frederick William in 1873. Her interest in gynaecological matters caused a rift between her and her mother, and with her intellectual, questioning nature, she was saddened by her husband's inability to share her interests. After nursing her children through diphtheria in the winter of 1878, she caught the infection herself and died at the age of thirty-five.
Alice's letters to her mother were originally published in 1884. This edition includes various appendices and commentaries published shortly after her death, and an afterword on the subsequent tragedies suffered by several members of her family.
