The Queen’s daily life of duty and dilemma has been monitored closely for seven decades. Each diary appointment, along with every deadpan impromptu aside, has been noted by royal pundits and historians.
But the imagined private life of Her Majesty has been at least as powerful a cultural influence as the actual public life. In our collective stories, and even in our dreams, Elizabeth II has been a regular member of the cast: a constant symbol of authority and regimented splendour. And now, towards the end of her reign, in a less deferential age, the monarch’s thoughts and concerns are familiar topics for literary speculation and satire. The image of the Queen, whether in profile on a postage stamp, or on canvas in regal portraiture, has been given a range of artistic treatments, many of them subversive, from Andy Warhol’s pop art portrait, to the one where the monarch’s eyes are shut, Chris Levine’s 2004 Lightness of Being.
