CAROLINE OF ENGLAND: An Augustan Portrait

It is unfortunate that R. L. Arkell's Caroline of Ansbach (Oxford) should have come out so recently, for in a sense it ""stole the show"". There seems scarcely room for two better than competent biographies of this English queen, whose importance has been underemphasized, at least on this side of the water. She and Walpole ruled England infinitely more surely than either her father-in-law, George I, or his son, both of whom preferred their native Hanover to England. This book is more interesting historically, than the Arkell book, perhaps; it gives a clearer picture of a period of confused relationships, of an England emerging from a strange period of submergence. But Caroline as a personality seems to be more a symbol than a creature of flesh and blood. It is sound scholarship and interesting reading, though one feels it lacks the color and drama it might contain.