Little Mother of Russia: A Biography of Empress Marie Fedorovna (1847-1928)
Hall has answered the need for a new, just, and accessible biography of Empress Marie Feodorovna, consort of the next-to-last czar of Russia. A daughter of the king of Denmark, Marie exchanged the informality of her native country for an amazingly opulent yet rigid court life when she married into the Russian imperial family. But her marriage proved successful, and the premature death of her husband, Czar Alexander III, devastated her. Although the empress' political influence had been subtle during her husband's reign, we see here that it exerted itself more overtly in the opening years of the reign of her weak son, Nicholas II. Hall is generous and insightful in analyzing the relationship between the extroverted Marie and her reserved daughter-in-law, Empress Alexandra. Nicholas and Alexandra, of course, were removed by the revolution and eventually executed; Marie, on the other hand, was rescued from Bolshevik hands and lived to the end of her long life as a force to be reckoned with both personally and politically.Brad HooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.