Volume 48, Number 2 · February 8, 2001
A Royal Mystery
By P.N. Furbank
The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette
by Chantal Thomas, translated from the French by Julie Rose
Zone Books, 255 pp., $26.00
Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen of France
by Evelyne Lever, translated from the French by Catherine Temerson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 357 pp., $30.00
'Lives' of kings and queens, when they belong to the category of the biographie romancée, where facts are a little hazy and dialogues and private thoughts are freely invented, are usually shelved by libraries under 'Biography.' More serious and scholarly royal biographies, on the other hand, tend to get placed under 'History.' But ought they to be so? The life of Marie-Antoinette raises this question forcibly.
Review, 3932 words
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