Six Years at the Russian Court

In 1898, an Irish woman arrived at the Winter Palace to serve as nanny to four young grand duchesses. She would remain there for six years, becoming the intimate witness to a family's private life that the world would later obsess over, and then destroy. Margaretta Eagar cared for Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, the four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II and his German-born Empress, watching them grow from childhood into young women whose fates were already being shaped by forces none of them could see. Eagar wrote her memoir with fierce intentionality. Angry at the fictionalized accounts circulating about the Russian imperial family, she insisted she had set down "plain, unvarnished truth", and what emerges is neither hagiography nor exposé, but something rarer: a detailed, affectionate portrait of a family seen from within their domestic sanctuary. The grand duchesses nicknamed themselves OTMA; Eagar chronicles their lessons, their games, their relationships with their parents, and the elaborate rituals of court life that surrounded them. Read today, the book carries an unbearable weight. Written in 1906, years before the Revolution, before the execution of the entire family in a basement room in Yekaterinburg, it preserves a world of imperial Russia in its final, gilded summer. This is history's most famous family rendered human: troublesome, loving, ordinary in their extraordinariness.