The Accidental Empress: A Novel

First, I'd like to express how much I enjoy the novels of Allison Pataki. One of the best historical accounts of Desiree Clary, Napoleon's first fiancé, comes from Pataki herself in [book:The Queen's Fortune|46183713]. Although fictional, Pataki's research delivers equally balanced detail of Napoleon's young amour. Clary, much later, becomes the Queen of Sweden. IMO, [book:The Queen's Fortune|46183713] is the best of Pataki's offerings. While I enjoyed <i>The Accidental Empress</i>, I didn't find it as compelling a story as the former. It was terribly depressing. Even I could feel the distant pain. And, it was this pain that cast a dark shadow on the unfolding story.Beloved by her people, Empress Elisabeth led a very difficult life behind palace doors. It was a lonely existence. The overall despair Sisi undoubtedly experienced caused me great sadness.Sisi's life wasn't always hers, especially when one considers her age when she and Emperor Franz Joseph were betrothed. Sisi was fifteen. Her upbringing, although the daughter of a duke, was much less formal than that of Franz's dutiful role as prince in training. Sisi could not have anticipated all that was expected of her as Empress. She was probably blinded by romantic ideas of a young girl. From the beginning, her husband was not her own. Even the children born to the Empress did not fully belong to her. Archduchess Sophie, Franz Joseph's overbearing mother, swooped in after Sisi gave birth to the Habsburg heirs and wrestled control of the minor children. The Archduchess felt that Elisabeth was too young and flighty to care for the children properly. Here is an Empress of lands and countries, yet, she is denied the rights of a mother –the sole expectation of a Queen consort! The relationship between Sisi and her domineering mother-in-law is damaged from the get-go. <i>The Accidental Empress</i> derives its title from history itself. Sisi's sister Helene was supposed to be Franz Joseph's bride. Unexpectedly, the young Emperor fell for the youngest sister brought to the imperial court of Austria. Archduchess Sophie had chosen the eldest daughter of her sister, Ludovika. Sophie found the countenance of Helene to be much more suitable to her son's. But Franz Joseph made his wishes perfectly clear: it is Elisabeth...or no one at all! The rest is history. <blockquote>"They call me the first lady of the land, whereas I think of myself as the odd woman out."[book:The Accidental Empress|22609307] covers the years of Empress Elisabeth's reign up until the Hungarian coronation of Franz Joseph and Sisi. Pataki's next book, [book:Sisi: Empress on Her Own|25733965] concludes the story of the Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary.3.5 stars (rounded up)

A handsome young prince fell in love with a beautiful innocent girl from the countryside. But the course of true love never runs smooth. So the prince had to overcome obstacles in order to marry his love. The love story of the young Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and the beautiful Duchess Elizabeth of Bavaria, nicknamed Sisi, is such a fairytale. When there is no evil magician or wicked stepmother available, the mother-in-law is usually cast as the villain. Fortunately, the overbearing mother-in-law of the beautiful Sisi and the stage mother of the handsome Franz Joseph, was available as the villain. But, fairytales cannot survive the harsh reality. So Franz Joseph and Sisi did not live happily ever after. This book, written by a female author, chose the battle between Sisi and her mother-in-law for the heart and soul of Franz as the central theme. I am giving the book a 3 star rating because it is a small scale tale of the boudoir with very little mention of anyone or anything else.Even though Franz Joseph was born an imperial prince, he was not the son of the emperor. Even though he was raised for the job, his mother, the Archduchess Sophie, had to fight to secure his position as the emperor of a complex patch-quilt empire of multiple ethnic groups. It was a time of shifting political landscapes and raging nationalistic fervor, young Franz naturally relied on the advice of his mother, an experienced court survivor, in his early years to guide him through the choppy waters of treacherous politics and dangerous whirlpools of violent revolutions. He must have learned his lessons well because it’s a miracle that he survived repeated storms and died in his old age as one of the last emperors of Europe.Sophie had worked hard to raise her oldest son Franz to be an emperor and had engineered to place him on the throne. Unlike Sisi who remained identified with her natal house, the Bavarian Wittelsbachs, Sophie had identified herself with her marital house, the Austrian Hapsburgs. Even though she too was very beautiful, she was known for her steel as “the only man at court”. (She not only managed to make Franz Joseph the Emperor of Austria, she also made her second son Maximilian the Emperor of Mexico. But, as she was not there in Mexico to guide Maximilian, he made a mess and got himself deposed and executed by the revolutionaries. Since this was not part of the story of Sisi, the author made no mention of it.) When she chose Helene of Bavaria to be her daughter-in-law, she was choosing an empress for Franz. As such, decorum and pedigree were all that mattered. Love was irrelevant. That’s why they all had mistresses and lovers. But, young Franz Joseph chose love instead.Sisi was unquestionably a very most beautiful woman and she knows it and did everything she could throughout her life to remain so. A spoiled and free-spirited young girl from an impoverished duchy, she was homesick and despised Austria. Unwilling to conform to the strict imperial protocol normal in European courts and high societies, she chose to remain aloof and apart. Dreaming of romantic fantasies, she wanted her husband all to herself. Having little understanding of the imperial complexity, she was upset that he didn’t abandon everyone and everything for her. Finding herself way over her head, she needed her husband to be her full-time protector. But Sophie was not about to hand over her precious son to an upstart naive foreign teenage girl. Envious of Sophie’s influence over Franz, she blamed her mother-in-law for her loneliness and isolation. Even though she huffed and puffed about her husband’s affairs, she then gleefully had an affair with a married man where she had the power position. Princess Marie Valerie was known as the “Hungarian Child” not just because she was born in Hungary and grew up in Hungary but many suspected her paternity was also Hungarian. And of course, she was Sisi’s favorite child. As this book is a narrative from Sisi’s point of view as a modern American woman, it of course takes her position that she was always right and righteous while her mother-in-law was always wrong and devious.Surrounded by courtiers and servants and guards everywhere continuously, Franz desperately needed a private sanctuary. Exhausted by the minefields of foreign threats and domestic quagmires during the day, he was anxious for a quiet safe place at night. Instead, he got a nagging bitching willful child bride. Sisi, desperate for love and frustrated at not being the center of his attention, felt neglected and unfulfilled. When Sophie removed her children from her care, as was the custom of all upper class families at that time, Sisi fell into a perpetual melancholy and became completely self-absorbed. As soon as she gave birth to a son, she decamped from the court. The irony is that, while Sisi clung to her own mother and was distraught when her own children were taken from her, she tried hard to destroy the long-standing close mother-son relationship of Sophie and Franz. When they rebuffed her attempts, she sulked and stewed. While she resented Sophie’s meddling in politics, she longed to do the same and was proud of her meddling in the Hungary Compromise. As the battle between Sisi and Sophie wages on, Franz was caught in the crossfire and sought consolation elsewhere.The outcome was a fracturing of the fairytale. Franz Joseph, stoic and rational, chose his duty to his empire as was required of him. Sisi gave up the fight and escaped into constant travels to seek love abroad. She became popularly known by her nickname Sisi. This book ends when Franz Joseph and Sisi were crowned in Budapest as the King and Queen of Hungary. The author saved the rest of her story for another book. As usual, death has the last word. Her assassination by an anarchist transformed the story into a romance. All criticisms of Sisi shirking her duty as the empress ceased and she became the most beloved not only of the emperor but of the empire. When the history is forgotten, the fairytale remained, especially when the star is so beautiful.

Sisi always fascinates, so it isn't surprising that she should be featured in the novel version of a docu-drama, historical fiction that draws heavily on fact. The book and its sequel "Sisi" are a faithful rendering of the information, and it's clear the author has researched her character's life thoroughly.However, a large part of Sisi's charm was her undoubted eccentricity, and we have no hint of this. She is a glossy, beautiful aristocrat, but she is not written in such a way as to bring out the neuroses and the contradictions that make her so interesting. This Sisi could be a Hollywood wife, or a Forties film star - she is made so ordinary and normal as to be stripped of everything that made her the striking, fascinating and unique individual she was. This book would be a perfect candidate for a mini-series, and maybe that is its intention.She was almost undoubtedly an anorexic, but there is no treatment of the grip this awful disease has on the women who fall victim to it. And she could be bewitching, but she could also be inexplicably selfish and careless in her treatment of her two older children, from which Rudolf in particular suffered considerably, and it's hard to believe that this was entirely the result of her mother-in-law's dominance, as this book asserts. More explicably, she had her two older children young and aristocrats in those days generally were able to shed responsibility for their offspring very easily - something of which Sisi was able to take full advantage and did. Also - do we really believe she had a physical affair, however short-lived, with Andrassy? Her record is that of a woman who only liked to be chased and admired - she nowhere emerges as sexually adventurous, or for that matter stupid enough, to risk her position for a quick fling. As the book is only written through Sisi's eyes, we don't get anybody else's view of her, and I find it hard to believe she was this self-aware and rational, or this modern in her determination to take control of her life. Very little of her real-life writings or exchanges suggest anything other than a creature largely driven by impulse, flitting from moment to moment without a clear overall plan, and it wouldn't have been expected of her in any case, least of all by herself. Having produced an heir and achieved what she wanted for her beloved Hungary, the rest of her life was about escaping.I also found the language used in the books to be closer to the present day than the nineteenth century. The author's propensity to use the expression "I'm fine", or "That's fine" was so repetitive and grating that in the end I felt like making a list.of the number of times she did it. Given that nineteenth century English is so close to that of the present day, surely some effort could have been made to make it sound more authentic. I felt that she missed the opportunity to create a much more richly atmospheric world by her use of language, which was generally fairly commonplace and could have appeared in any romantic novel.This book is probably good in having made the story of Sisi more generally accessible - but to anyone used to reading biographies of the Empress, it will never even come close to the truth of her story. Overall, I found it a bit disappointing. If you're going to write historical fiction, then do it in a way that makes it memorable and startling - otherwise there isn't much point in doing it at all.

A novel based on of the life of Sisi Empress of Austria who unexpectedly married Franz Joseph and was thrust into a difficult role. A life worth recording and a fascinating and tumultuous period of history(with more to come) and p0lenty romance though I didn't find this the best written book.

I found this book extremely intriguing. It is beautifully written and I couldn't put it down. I could visualise the different characters and all the lovely clothes that Sisi wore.

I just LOVE LOVE LOVE this book!Can't wait until 'Empress on her own' arrives!

Great read