Princesses Behaving Badly
Real Stories from History Without the Fairy-Tale Endings
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
These 30 true stories of take-charge princesses from around the world and throughout history offer a different kind of bedtime story . . .
Pop history meets a funny, feminist point-of-view in these illustrated tales of “royal terrors who make modern gossip queens seem as demure as Snow White” (New York Post).
You think you know her story. You’ve read the Brothers Grimm, you’ve watched the Disney cartoons, and you cheered as these virtuous women lived happily ever after. But real princesses didn’t always get happy endings—and had very little in common with Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Belle, or Ariel.
Featuring illustrations by Wicked cover artist, Douglas Smith, Princesses Behaving Badly tells the true stories of famous (Marie Antoinette; Lucrezia Borgia)—and some not-so-famous—princesses throughout history and around the world, including:
• Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, a Nazi spy.
• Empress Elisabeth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who slept wearing a mask of raw veal.
• Princess Olga of Kiev, who slaughtered her way to sainthood.
• Princess Lakshmibai, who waged war on the battlefield with her toddler strapped to her back.
Some were villains, some were heroes, some were just plain crazy. But none of these princesses felt constrained to our notions of “lady-like” behavior.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
London-based McRobbie flirts with real controversy only to evade it in this collection of rotten royal behavior, and her book suffers for it. During her unhappy marriage to society photographer Earl Snowdon, Queen Elizabeth II's younger sister Margaret notorious for her poor choice in men and being a spoiled, aimless, and ill-tempered alcoholic allegedly enjoyed a threesome that was captured in photos so compromising that Britain's MI5 staged an elaborate heist in 1971 to steal them back. Banished to Constantinople to marry a Roman senator, 5th-century Honoria wrote to Rome's worst enemy, Attila the Hun, for help, sending her ring, which the barbarian chose to interpret as a marriage proposal and used as his excuse to invade Rome. Although Sarah Winnemucca lectured to thousands of whites as a "civilized" Indian princess and agitated on behalf of her Piute tribe to President Rutherford Hayes, Native Americans saw "her as a pawn in the pay of the U.S. government." McRobbie mostly ignores the escapades of contemporary royals like Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit, who has an illegitimate son with a convicted drug dealer; Sarah Ferguson, who sold access to Britain's Prince Andrew; or Monaco's Stephanie, lately divorced from a circus performer. Unfortunately, while McRobbie has the subject matter, her prose is sloppy, her attempts at cleverness fall flat, and her thumbnail portraits are shallow. Illus.
