ABOUT THE BOOK
Stefan Zweig based his biography of Marie Antoinette, who became the Queen of France at the age of fifteen, on the correspondence between her and her mother, and her great love the Count Axel von Fersen. Zweig analyses the chemistry of a woman’s soul from her intimate pleasures to her public suffering as a Queen under the weight of misfortune and history. Zweig describes Marie Antoinette in the king’s bedroom, in the enchanted and extravagant world of the Trianon, and with her children. And in his account of the Revolution he describes her resolve during the failed escape to Varennes, her imprisonment in the Conciergerie and her final tragic destiny under the guillotine.
Zweig’s account has been the definitive biography of Marie Antoinette since its publication, inspiring Antonia Fraser and the recent film adaptation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.
Translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul
Cover Illustration: Franz Xaver Wagenschon
ISBN 978 1906548 30 8
496pp
