“Not true,” Queen Victoria scrawls. “Not even one word of truth,” she adds, as well as “nonsense”, and “quite false”. The monarch was responding in no uncertain terms to the historian Agnes Strickland’s 1840 account of the queen’s early life, taking its author to task with more than 100 annotations, crossings outs and corrections in a unique edition of an “extremely rare” book that is set to be auctioned in November.

Strickland was already a published historian when she was commissioned to write Queen Victoria from Her Birth to Her Bridal, an effusively positive two-volume work. But, according to Sotheby’s, Victoria was “so irritated by [the] inaccuracies” she discovered in her presentation copy that she returned it to its authors, complete with her extensive comments.

Catalogue of errors … royal corrections to Agnes Strickland’s Queen Victoria from Her Birth to Her Bridal

The biographer describes Victoria as “flushed and fatigued” as she makes her first appearance at William IV’s court. “Not at all fatigued,” notes the queen. There was a “tinge of melancholy” to Victoria’s smile on her wedding day. “No,” says the queen.

According to Strickland’s younger sister Jane, the writer was so distressed by Victoria’s anger that she and her publisher set out to have all remaining copies of the book pulped. “The sale was stopped and where ever Miss Strickland was able to do so, she bought in those already out and destroyed them,” said Jane.

Victoria dismisses Strickland’s gushing claims about the scenes at “her majesty’s first soiree”, where the biographer writes that “upwards of two thousand gentlemen were present and the crowd was so tremendous that diamond buckles were broken or lost”, noting coolly: “The Queen only gave 1 or 2 concerts of 100 people.”

When Strickland describes Princess Sophia Matilda as “beautiful as an angel, and graceful as a nymph, the very beau ideal of a royal lady”, Victoria responds, curtly, “absurd”, and the queen also takes the trouble to correct the smallest of details. When Strickland rhapsodises about the young Queen Victoria, stating that “her fair hair was simply parted, and folded in what are called Madonna bands, and arranged at the back of her head in a Grecian knot”, the monarch takes the trouble to correct her, writing: “in plaits”.

Robert Graves’ dedication to Owen M Roberts, the man who saved his life

The biography, which is expected to sell for £10,000 to £15,000, is part of a library of more than 140 first-editions collected over 40 years by an English bibliophile that is due to be auctioned on 24 November. Expected by Sotheby’s to fetch in total between £1.5m-£2m, each of the titles features a hand-written inscription from the author. One features Oscar Wilde’s note to his first lover and loyal friend Robert Ross – “To the mirror of perfect friendship: Robbie: Whose name I have written on the portal of this little play”; another includes Ian Fleming’s note to Richard Hughes, the inspiration behind his character Dikko Henderson, in You Only Live Twice.

There’s a copy of Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis, inscribed to Neville Chamberlain, a TE Lawrence novel inscribed to his solicitor “with apologies for the trouble it is going to bring him”, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, thanking the producer of the film, Darryl F Zanuck “for a fine picture”.

John Steinbeck expresses his gratitude to legendary Hollywood producer Darryl F Zanuck

Perhaps most movingly, an edition of Robert Graves’ Fairies and Fusiliers is inscribed to Lieutenant Owen M Roberts, with the words “if it hadn’t been for you, butty, this book would be unwritten”. Graves was so badly injured at the Battle of the Somme on 20 July 1916 when a piece of shell fragment passed through his shoulder and chest that he was initially left for dead; Roberts saved his life.

The poet also dedicated to Roberts his poem Escape, which opens: “But I was dead, an hour or more. / I woke when I’d already passed the door / That Cerberus guards, and half-way down the road / To Lethe.”

“It’s extraordinary – he’s inscribing it to someone who saved his life. It’s a very personal moment, very moving,” said Peter Selley, senior specialist in books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s.

Selley added that the bibliophile who is selling the collection “has an eye for the connections of life, the crossings and connections and collisions”. “You get a sense of destiny in someone’s life,” he said. “A concentrated energy of a whole life, of a series of lives, in one inscription.”