The Queen Mum's the word

THE QUEEN MOTHER

The Official Biography

By William Shawcross

Knopf. 1096 pp., $40

When a biographer is writing about someone born in 1900 who lived until 2002, he must be tempted to see that life as emblematic of the century itself. William Shawcross has accepted this chronological gift and presented the official life of Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, later wife of King George VI, as a reflection of the monarchy, the nation and the century. The plot of the story is well-known: lovely commoner (who lives in Glamis Castle) weds shy prince; then his older brother abdicates, and they become king and queen; there's a bit of glitz, then the Blitz; the king's death; and 50 years of widowhood and life as the Queen Mum, all based, Shawcross says, on "obligation, discretion, and restraint."

There are no revelations here -- no secret love affairs, vices or thwarted aspirations to art. But there are a few surprises. Coming from a happy family of five brothers, the queen was an involved and affectionate mother. She was brokenhearted when she and the then-prince were sent on a state tour of Australia right after Princess Elizabeth was born. In 1933, she wrote a wise message to her husband in case of her death: "Be very careful not to ridicule your children or laugh at them. . . . Always try & talk very quietly to children. Never shout or frighten them. . . . Remember how your father, by shouting at you, & making you feel uncomfortable lost all your real affection." As a grandmother, she was much less strict than Prince Philip would have preferred; he "worried the grandparents would spoil his children."

Although she was patchily educated by governesses, Elizabeth was curious and genuinely open-minded. In Tahiti, she noted about the native dancers, "Instead of being strong healthy cannibals with strange religions and no clothes, they are now weakly half hearted Roman Catholics with European clothes. It seems all wrong." She loved Yiddish jokes as well as her favorite author, P.G. Wodehouse. While the language of her letters and diaries is very Wodehousean -- people are either "too heavenly" or "beastly " -- she could be frank about the pressures of royal ritual. She coped, according to poet laureate Ted Hughes, with whom she shared a late friendship, by being "positive about everything," and the transparent (backward-reading) codes in which she recorded her negative moments are touchingly innocent: "I ma tsom dexelprep," when she was deciding whether to marry, or, just before her wedding, "leef rehtar desserped."

The villains of this biography are the duke and duchess of Windsor. Before his abdication, the duke was very popular. But Elizabeth came to distrust and dislike him when he tried to bully his brother (her husband, now the king) about money, titles and residences. As she said of the duke in an interview, "He had this extraordinary charm, and then it all disappeared." The Windsors' 1930s visits to Berlin, where the duchess was fawned over and called Her Royal Highness, as well as the duke's meeting with Hitler, further alienated the family in England. After King George VI's death, the duke called his mother, Queen Mary, and Elizabeth "ice-veined bitches" who would not let him enjoy his birthright.

Elizabeth spent half her long life as a widow. She was annoyed that some members of Parliament seemed to want her to "retire decently to Kew and run a needlework guild," and she thought her official residence, Clarence House, was "loathsome." But she stayed actively in public life until the very end, and Shawcross has given us every flag-waving, school opening, gin and tonic, horse race and thank-you note of those last 50 years. Unfortunately, Princess Margaret burned all her mother's correspondence with Princess Diana, the only really interesting exchange, and no one ever asked the Queen Mother to discuss changes in marriage or child-rearing over the last century. This enormous record of a dutiful and privileged life may please readers who bought the mug, but it will leave others feeling rehtar desserped.

Elaine Showalter's most recent book is "A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx."