Princess Gisella of Austria

Princess Marie Valerie of Austria

Prince George

Prince Konrad

**Gisella Louise Marie of Austria** (12 July 1856 – 27 July 1932) was the second daughter and eldest surviving child of Emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria and Elisabeth in Bavaria.

## Appearance

Her mother often complained about Gisella's meagre looks, and contemporaries, while not being as harsh, did acknowledge that Gisella didn't at all look like her mother, who was a famed beauty. Gisella resembled her father more. She had auburn hair, arched eyebrows and full lips. Overall she resembled the women from her father's side of the family.

Her younger sister, Princess Marie Valerie of Austria, described her as very pretty.

## Personality

Gisela was artistically talented as a painter and a writer. From a young age, she wrote poems on an excellent level and she read a lot. She had a very charitable nature, funding, running and visiting multiple hospitals in World War One. She was also, quietly, a feminist and was quite excited when women got to vote for the first time. She voted and encouraged other noble women she knew to do the same.

## Biography

### Childhood

Gisella was born in 1856 as the second daughter of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Her mother was only seventeen at the time of her birth, and the court that she wasn't ready to raise children herself. Although Elisabeth protested, her children were raised by their paternal grandmother Sophie.

Elisabeth did get to take her two daughters on a trip to Hungary. On the trip, infant Gisella got ill and passed on the illness to her older sister Sophie, which killed her. Her mother always blamed infant Gisella for killing Sophie and the two would never be close.

Gisella was really close to her brother Rudolf (1858) as they were raised together by their grandmother and father as their mother travelled the world with her last child, Valerie (1868), who was the only child she got to raise herself.

### Marriage

In the 1870s, the Empress faced a problem: her younger brother Mapperl was madly in love with the Princess Amalie, but she was already engaged to Prince Leopold of Bavaria. Elisabeth was able to break the engagement by promising her own daughter, an Emperor's daughter, as a bride to Prince Leopold. Even though the Empress was against teen marriage, she had no issue marrying her own 16-year old daughter off to a perfect stranger.

Despite the arranged marriage, Leopold and Gisella were very happy together and had a lovely marriage for over fifty years. Gisella's mother didn't even attend the wedding she had so precariously planned and never made an effort to visit her daughter's new family. Gisella felt right at home in Bavaria as a wife and a mother, as she welcomed four children:

* Elisabeth Mary Augusta (1874)
* Augusta Mary Louisa (1875)
* George Francis Leopold (1880)
* Conrad Leopold Joseph (1883)

### Adulthood

Gisella was hurt immensely when her brother Rudolf committed suicide in 1889. In her own grief, she also had to support her father and younger sister, as their mother didn't attend the funeral. Gisella was comforted in 1893 when both her daughters happily married. She spent her years visiting African countries with her husband, visiting her many grandchildren and looking after her own father and grandparents.