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Death by Fame Book

She was the Princess Diana of her day: beautiful, anorexic, trapped in an unhappy marriage and a stifling court routine from which she escaped through constant traveling and charity defiantly lavished on those least acceptable to her in-laws (in this case, the Hungarians and the Irish). But Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-98) was a Victorian celebrity, not a contemporary one, and though her biographer strives mightily to equate her assassination by an Italian anarchist with Diana's fatal accident while in flight from the paparazzi, "death by fame" is not a very accurate title. Nor do all historians accept Sinclair's contention that Elisabeth's husband, Hapsburg emperor Franz Joseph, infected her with a venereal disease that made him guiltily willing to indulge her every whim. He may simply have loved her despite her obvious mental instability and his equally open infidelities. Whatever its factual wobbles, Sinclair's overheated biography is nonetheless good, tawdry fun for its gossipy portrait of the quarrelsome, overbred, and intermarried royalty of Europe on the eve of its final eclipse. Romantic and kind-hearted--but also hysterically restless and incapable of sustained devotion to anything but horseback riding and obsessive physical exercise--Elisabeth was a fitting empress for the enervated fin de siècle. --Wendy Smith Read More

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  • Product Description

    "I wanted to kill a royalty," the assassin would later tell his questioners. "It did not matter which one." In 1898 Luigi Lucheni fatally stabbed Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, on Lake Geneva as she prepared to board a steamer form the Mont Blanc pier. Her life has been on of both profound sadness and inspiring perseverance; and in its course she set the style for the royal rebels who would follow her, particularly the late Diana, Princess of Wales. While still a child, Elisabeth was married to the Hapsburg prince Franz Josef, heir to the Austrian Empire. She gave him three children; one of whom, Crown Prince Rudolf, would later commit suicide at Mayerling. Finding the atmosphere of the Austro-Hungarian court stifling, the increasingly erratic empress traveled incessantly.

    Abandoning her husband to the attentions of the Viennese comic actress Katharina Schratt, Elisabeth went on errands of mercy to the docks and slums of London and Liverpool, Barcelona and Naples, Smyrna and Marseilles. She was the despair of local police, who could not protect her, even though she wore disguises. She supported independence movements in Ireland, where she hunted superbly alongside her close companion, the English cavalryman "Bay" Middleton; and also in Hungary, an integral part of her husband's deteriorating empire. Obsessed by the Greek ideal of physical perfection, she traveled through the great cities of Europe with a giant movable gym in tow, exercising every day while suffering the ravages of anorexia.

    When Lucheni assassinated the empress, he killed the most alluring royal figure of the Victorian age. But fame was her real executioner. Her celebrity had led to her death. Elisabeth had been driven into loneliness until she had lost all sense of reality, pursuing a desperate liberty that a confined marriage would never allow her. Her murder was the tocsin for the Hapsburgs, and the tragic beauty's death was the beginning of the end of imperial Europe.

  • 0312198523
  • 9780312198527
  • Andrew Sinclair
  • 1 April 1999
  • St Martins Pr
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 224
  • 1st U.S. Ed
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