SEVEN SISTERS

The trials and triumphs of the Habsburg women.

In a sprawling group biography, Buckley recounts the lives of the seven daughters of Empress Maria Theresia (1717-1780), women whose function was to make politically advantageous marriages in the service of the Habsburg empire. The sisters—Marianna, Marie Christine, Elisabeth, Amalie, Carolina, Josepha, and Antonia—were necessarily in competition, some envying one another for the men they married, some dramatically protesting those chosen for them. The domineering Maria Theresia judged her daughters harshly, although she admitted that at times she was moved to compassion by their distress. Nevertheless, she persisted in treating them as pawns on a “dynastic chessboard,” making sure they presented themselves as appealing. The scars of smallpox, for example, caused Elisabeth’s value to fall drastically because of her appearance. The young women showed greatly different attitudes about being manipulated by their mother: Amalie, who was denied marrying a man she loved, betrothed instead to a man even her brother found insufferable, proved “the most fractious of the seven sisters.” Carolina, who at 15 left her family to become Queen of Naples, possessed, her mother thought, “a certain ambition in her.” It would serve her well: Her husband, the king, was exceedingly ugly. The most notorious of the seven proved to be Antonia, who, at the age of 14, was married by proxy to the French dauphin, whom she had not yet met, and became Marie Antoinette. In four short years, she would be crowned queen of France. Besides marrying well, the women were obligated to produce a male heir, which entailed their facing the perils of childbirth and the fear of infant and early childhood mortality. Buckley weaves a lively narrative around court intrigue, alliances, and the many conflicts that characterized the 18th-century’s roiling politics.

A richly detailed history of eventful lives.