Clare McHugh

Clare McHugh reported for newspapers, edited magazines and taught high school history before she began publishing fiction in her fifties. Born in London and raised in America, she read European history at Harvard, which tells in how tightly her books stay to the record. William Morrow published A Most English Princess in September 2020. Its subject is Victoria, Princess Royal, eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, engaged at fifteen to Frederick William of Prussia and, briefly in 1888, German empress; her son became Kaiser Wilhelm II. McHugh worked from the long correspondence between mother and daughter, and from biographies and other contemporary accounts, tracing Vicky's effort to carry liberal English ideas into a Prussian court that resisted them, Bismarck most of all. A second novel, The Romanov Brides, followed in 2024. She divides her time between London and Amagansett on Long Island.