Author: [CHARLOTTE AUGUSTA OF WALES]
Title: Gulzara, Princess of Persia; or, the Virgin Queen. Collected from the Original Persian.
Description: London: Printed for John Souter...by J. Adlard..., 1816. FIRST AND ONLY EDITION. Tall 8vo, 228 x 133 mms., pp,. xiii [xiv blank, xv "The Persian Dedication," xvi blank], 348, recently recased in blue boards, paper label on spine; text a little browned, but a good copy. This rather laboured satire on Princess Augusta of Wales (1796 - 1817), was the only child of George, Prince of Wales (later King George IV), and his wife, Caroline of Brunswick. Had she outlived both her grandfather King George III and her father, she would have become Queen of the United Kingdom; but she died at the age of 21, predeceasing them both. It was reviewed at some length in The Critical Review for 1816, but without ever once disclosing that the work was not a satire: "The author of Gulzara is not deficient in humour, and we are not and then reminded of the stile of the very best writer in this kind [possibly Byron], in any language: but no such pretensions are made: the work is instructive, entertaining, and now and then satirical, and that is all perhaps that the writer intended." The reviewer in The Monthly Review was a bit more forthcoming about the disguised Gulzara: "[A]nd the actions of the Kings, Queens, Princes, and Princesses of Persia and Tartary, in some former indeterminate age, may be clearly identified with those of the Kings, Queens, Princes, and Princesses of Great Britain and France in an age not very distant from the nineteenth century."

Keywords: satire royalty prose


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