Elizabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary

She was the most beautiful woman in Europe, and she spent her life running from the crown that made her famous. This is the tragic account of Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, the Bavarian princess known as 'Sisi' who never quite fit into the world she was born to rule. Married at sixteen to Emperor Franz Joseph, she rebelled against the rigid Habsburg court with a wildness that only increased as the years darkened. She traveled constantly, seeking freedom in western Europe, while her husband waited in Vienna and her children grew up strangers to her. The death of her beloved son Crown Prince Rudolf, who took his own life in 1889 at the hunting lodge of Mayerling, broke something in her that never healed. She wandered for a decade more, a ghost in beautiful gowns, until an Italian anarchist assassinated her in Geneva in 1898. Written in the early twentieth century, this account captures both the glamour and the anguish of a woman who became a legend precisely because her life was so full of ruin.