LYTTON Strachey did it. Cecil-Woodham-Smith did it. Now Gillian Gill has done it: follow up a distinctive portrait of Florence Nightingale, England's sainted Lady With the Lamp, with a magisterial treatment of Queen Victoria. It's the one-two punch of 19th-century British biography.

In "Nightingales," Gill mined newly discovered family correspondence as well as the extensive public record of Nightingale's work from the Crimean War onward, establishing without question the heroic nature and extraordinary accomplishment of her protagonist (r)? features of the life story that were first cast into doubt with Strachey's debunking portrayal in "Eminent Victorians."

In "We Two," Gill aims in the opposite direction: the Queen Victoria she gives us in this closely drawn portrait of a royal marriage is a more ordinary woman than we might have supposed. The longest-ruling monarch in British history suffered greatly under what the queen herself called "the yoke" of matrimony, enduring nine pregnancies in the first two decades of her reign (r)? which left her an outsider at her own court, relegated to the "shadow side" of life, as she wrote in a letter of warning to her 17-year-old daughter, Vicky, newly married to Prince Frederick William of Prussia and soon to be pregnant for the first time.

Victoria married at 20, and as with so many young brides, the connubial life she got was not the one she'd hoped for. Yet as Queen of England she had, of course, more reason than most to expect better. Gill adroitly establishes Victoria's absolute difference in opportunity from all other British women, and most female members of European royalty, who were banned from inheriting their national thrones.

"As a social and legal entity," Gill notes, "Victoria was far more man than woman." Although readers may be surprised to learn that the queen was not the wealthiest woman in Britain (Angela Burdett-Coutts, who inherited a banking fortune, could claim that distinction), she was still the only woman allowed "full, independent legal control over her income and possessions whether or not she was married."

On Victoria's accession to the throne one month after her 18th birthday, she found herself at once involved in daily affairs of state and permitted to socialize after hours in ways previously forbidden to the cloistered teenage heiress apparent. Immensely popular with her subjects, Victoria was living "just the sort of life I like," she crowed to her older half-sister Feodora, who had been married off, as Gill puts it, to a "fourth-rank prince with a postage-stamp kingdom" in Germany. Victoria had every reason to believe her new style of life would continue.

Gill's analysis of the marriage Victoria made is a brutally persuasive indictment of the social institution that cheated her of the rare independence she was granted by her genetic destiny. Never mind that she ruled the richest and most powerful empire of her day; never mind that she passionately loved her chosen husband, a man just her own age who also happened to be her first cousin, the stirringly handsome Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Fleeting compassion

Never mind that Albert himself was in the anomalous position of having to marry for money. Gill allows us to feel a more than fleeting compassion for the young man who "could have succeeded as a professor, geologist, botanist, statistician, musician, engineer or bureaucrat," yet "by the standards of his caste" was forbidden to "train, take up a profession and earn money."

Marriage was the great leveler (r)? for the queen anyway. Even as royal rules of precedence required Albert to walk several paces behind his wife in public, the rules of the bedroom and nursery made Victoria subservient to her husband, deferential by convention if not by law. Within a year of tying the knot, she had reason to fear that she had become queen in name alone.

Both Victoria and Albert had been reared by tutors from the German middle class with whom they formed close emotional ties. By directing their young charges' education and inculcating in them the principles of virtuous hard work and abstemious living, Victoria's beloved Lehzen and Albert's Florschtz had a democratizing influence on the royal couple that would be hard to overestimate.

Victoria and Albert seemed cast from a different mold than their debauched and dissipated royal parents and grandparents, ready to restore dignity to the British monarchy by presenting themselves as a couple not so different from their subjects.

In carefully staged snapshots released to the press, the royal marriage was pictured on vacation at the seashore, both parents fully engaged in family life. Victoria retired to the nursery, Albert controlled the royal pocketbook and all was right with the world.

In Victoria and Albert's family we see the template for our modern-day frumpish Windsors (r)? curiously average sorts who just happen to live in enormous houses and dress in kilts or sport tiaras on certain occasions.

Albert was the enforcer of the new code, and Gill explains that the Victorian era, with its celebration of a bland domesticity, should more accurately be called "Albertian" in its origins.

Gill shows Victoria herself straining at the bonds, sometimes shockingly so. The ever-pregnant queen was "like a fat tiger," Gill tells us, "content with the cage, answering to the whip, but lashing out from time to time, and daring her tamer to get careless."

The woman who became known as "The Grandmother of Europe" for the offspring she sent into royal marriages all across the continent, disliked motherhood intensely. On the eve of her daughter Vicky's wedding she wept, telling Albert: "It is like taking a poor lamb to be sacrificed."

But the British people hated to see their spirited queen lagging figuratively, if not literally, behind priggish Prince Albert. Aside from his triumph in getting the Crystal Palace built, Albert's accomplishments seemed to impress only his wife. Even she may have clung to him most tenaciously in memory, after his death at 42 from typhoid fever. It was then, in her long withdrawal into mourning, that she wrote so eloquently of "we two," recalling a time "when the world seemed only to be ourselves."