Very Good Biography | Marie-Therese, Child of Terror: The Fate of Marie Antoinette's Daughter

Flat | Marie-Therese, Child of Terror: The Fate of Marie Antoinette's Daughter | Susan Nagel

books:


	• Marie-Therese, Child of Terror: The Fate of Marie Antoinette's Daughter Susan Nagel Bloomsbury USA, 2008 - 418 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Superb biography of a neglected member of the French Royal Family

This fascinating biography of the only child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to survive till adulthood is well researched and beautifully written. The part about her parents during the French Revolution is fair and informative, showing them to be loving and concerned. You will look at them in a different light. A must for history buffs, especially because it gives a new slant on French history in the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries.

Very Good Biography

Most important to me in a biography is that the writer lay out the story of the person and the times in an interesting and readable way. For the writer this means finding the right balance between documenting, which can get very dry, and telling, which calls for judgment of what to leave in and out. Susan Nagel has hit a perfect balance. She has sorted through a tremendous number of sources and created what may be the first biography of the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette.

Next in importance to me when I read a biography is feeling, at the end, that I know and understand the person who is chronicled. For a subject such as Marie-Therese, the author must bridge the centuries so that the modern reader can actually understand a believer in the divine right of kings. Here, Nagel shows that she has come to know her subject and this period in France and she communicates it very well.

History certainly has some interesting twists and turns. The most interesting to me, in this book, is the support of the British monarchy for the Bourbon exiles not long after concluding a war with them. Another smaller curiosity is how in exile, in the rudest of circumstances, the royals maintain protocol. They bow before each other and the leave rooms in a prescribed order.

Susan Nagel does a wonderful job. For anyone interested in European history, she has created an excellent read.

for more information click here

Flat

I found this biography only moderately interesting, despite its many sensational (and largely unsubstantiated) claims. It's written in stodgy prose riddled with repetitions and irritating Americanisms. (Non-American readers may find it quite trying.) The narrative clunks along, never quite coming alive, although there are some decent passages. I also wondered as I ploughed through it whether a good storyteller would have been able to make Marie Therese seem more real and more interesting. She remained a distant figure for me.

for more information click here

The nearly forgotten history of the last true French Princess

Marie-Therese was a rarity in history. A survivor of a royal massacre who lived to tell the tale. However, her story isn't particularly well known after her parent's death. As a daughter who never had children of her own her place in history seemed slight, but as this book shows the mythos created around her survival made her one of the bedrocks of the Bourbon Royal cause for the rest of her life.

This is a story of great riches, tragedy and constant dislocation. It has ambition, treachery, murder and politics just to name a few elements. If you are looking for a fresh biography of this lady, then this book is unlikely to be bettered anytime soon. You have a good feeling for Marie-Therese's personality by the end of biography. She was a complicated lady who lived through a life of incredible extremes and who somehow survived an ordeal that would shatter most of us.

for more information click here

The first major biography of one of France?s most mysterious women?Marie Antoinette?s only child to survive the revolution.
Susan Nagel, author of the critically acclaimed biography Mistress of the Elgin Marbles, turns her attention to the life of a remarkable woman who both defined and shaped an era, the tumultuous last days of the crumbling ancien régime. Nagel brings the formidable Marie-Thérèse to life, along with the age of revolution and the waning days of the aristocracy, in a page-turning biography that will appeal to fans of Antonia Fraser?s Marie Antoinette and Amanda Foreman?s Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire.
In December 1795, at midnight on her seventeenth birthday, Marie-Thérèse, the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, escaped from Paris?s notorious Temple Prison. To this day many believe that the real Marie-Thérèse, traumatized following her family?s brutal execution during the Reign of Terror, switched identities with an illegitimate half sister who was often mistaken for her twin. Was the real Marie-Thérèse spirited away to a remote castle to live her life as the woman called ?the Dark Countess,? while an imposter played her role on the political stage of Europe? Now, two hundred years later, using handwriting samples, DNA testing, and an undiscovered cache of Bourbon family letters, Nagel finally solves this mystery. She tells the remarkable story in full and draws a vivid portrait of an astonishing woman who both defined and shaped an era. Marie-Thérèse?s deliberate choice of husbands determined the map of nineteenth-century Europe. Even Napoleon was in awe and called her ?the only man in the family.? Nagel?s gripping narrative captures the events of her fascinating life from her very public birth in front of the rowdy crowds and her precocious childhood to her hideous time in prison and her later reincarnation in the public eye as a saint, and, above all, her fierce loyalty to France throughout.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

hot