The woman who gave her name to a great age of English prose was herself competent in the craft. Unfortunately, her daughter Beatrice destroyed her major work, the 122 volumes of journal that she kept all her life (the last entry is 6 January 1901, two weeks before her death). She often wrote 2,500 words a day, the equivalent of a novel a month. The journal survives only in extracts Beatrice copied in blue notebooks before she consigned the rest to a fire. Victoria's most recent biographer, Cecil Woodham-Smith, says that "Her style of writing, far from literary, was admirably vivid; characters leap alive from the pages. She was honest, the leading characteristic of her nature; she did not write to justify herself, or to explain but poured with vehemence, enthusiasm, passion, sometimes with violence, but never with rancour, everything she had done, observed and experienced during the course of the day...