Volume 24, Number 16 · October 13, 1977
Risorgimento and Romantic Agony
By John Weightman
Cristina, Portraits of a Princess
by Beth Archer Brombert
Knopf, 402 pp., $15.00
Before reading this biography, I confess I had never wittingly given a thought to Cristina, Princess Belgiojoso, although I must have seen the reference to her in The Romantic Agony by Mario Praz and encountered her name elsewhere. A spot-check among some of my colleagues working on nineteenth-century literature has revealed that they too knew little or nothing about her. It would seem that this is only the second book on her in English; the first, A Revolutionary Princess by H.R. Whitehouse, came out as long ago as 1906. The only French version of her life—a spiteful attack, according to Mrs. Brombert—is an obscure volume, published in 1926, by A. Augustin-Thierry, a grandnephew of the famous historian, Augustin Thierry, with whom Cristina had a long and intimate intellectual friendship. The princess rates a short article in the Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique but none in the Britannica.
Review, 2515 words
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