marie antoinette the journey by antonia fraser

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Her queen is neither heroine nor villain, but a young wife and mother who, in her journey into maturity, finds herself caught in a deadly vise.

Fraser's approach is controlled and thoughtful, avoiding the extravagance of Alison Weir's royal biographies. The portrait is drawn delicately, with pleasant touches of humor (a long-awaited baby is conceived around the time of Benjamin Franklin's visit: 'Perhaps the King found this first contact with the virile New World inspirational'). Yet her graceful bearing, acquired under the tutelage of her demanding mother, the empress Maria Teresa, made her an unusually popular princess before she was scapegoated as 'Madame Deficit' and much, much worse. She would sometimes be trapped by ingenuousness, and later by a fatal sense of duty.

Her subject shows no let-them-eat cake arrogance, but is deeply (even surprisingly) compassionate, with a 'public reputation for sweetness and mercy' that is only later sullied by vituperative pamphleteers and bitter unrest. Fraser's sizable new portrait avoids the saccharine romance of Evelyne Lever's recent Marie Antoinette, balancing empathy for the pleasure-loving queen with an awareness of the inequalities that fed revolution after all, Marie herself was fully conscious of them. The queen of France's life is rich in emotional resonance, riddled with sexual subplots and personal tragedies, and provides fertile ground for biographers. Her indiscretions and na vet, scorned by elderly dowagers, are coupled with charity, joie de vivre and almost divine glamour but her life is cut brutally short. A child-princess is married off to a husband of limited carnal appetite.

Marie antoinette the journey by antonia fraser