Sisi

Tuesday

Anne de Courcy

The unfairytale life of two European princesses

This hefty book is more about context – the turbulent years of mid-19th-century Europe – than it is about its two protagonists. Details of the many popular uprisings of the time, plus the jockeying for position of the main players and the battles and intrigues involved, are so packed into its pages that teasing out the stories of the two empresses is not always easy. The early married life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, known as Sisi, sounds appalling. Her older sister had been groomed to marry the young Emperor Franz Joseph, but the moment he saw Sisi, then only 15, she was the one he wanted. It was impossible to turn him down. Much of the future of Bavaria (her parents’ kingdom), let alone that of her own family, depended on his goodwill.

Monday

William Cook

In search of Sisi

From our US edition

From my plush bedroom in the Beau Rivage, Geneva’s most historic grand hotel, I look down on the lakeside promenade where one of the most remarkable women of the nineteenth century met her dark, dramatic end. On September 10, 1898, Empress Elisabeth of Austria (commonly known as Sisi) was stabbed in the chest by an Italian anarchist as she was about to board a paddle steamer to Montreux. She was carried back into the Beau Rivage and up to the suite where she’d spent the previous night. Within half an hour she was dead. Today, the hotel’s palatial Sisi Suite still looks much as she would have found it.

sisi