Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette was an Austrian archduchess who married the future Louis XVI and became queen of France in 1774. Court expenditure, delayed motherhood and foreign birth made her a target of pamphlets that greatly exaggerated her influence and sexual conduct. During the Revolution she opposed many constitutional changes and sought aid from foreign monarchies. After the fall of the monarchy she was tried and executed in October 1793.

Sena Jeter Naslund’s Abundance gives Marie Antoinette an intimate fictional voice, while Juliet Grey’s trilogy beginning with Becoming Marie Antoinette follows her from Vienna to Versailles and revolution. Historical fiction often tries to recover the woman behind hostile propaganda, but sympathetic portrayals must still address her resistance to revolutionary government and secret political correspondence.

In Jean Plaidy’s Flaunting, Extravagant Queen, at the age of fifteen, Marie Antoinette, beautiful and charming bride to the impotent Dauphin, is plunged into the intrigue of Versailles. Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities is set after eighteen years of imprisonment in the Bastille, Doctor Alexandre Manette is reunited with his daughter Lucie and begins a new life in London. Other novels featuring Marie Antoinette include Michelle Moran’s Madame Tussaud, Bernard Cornwell’s Fallen Angels, Edward Rutherfurd’s Paris, and Jean Plaidy’s The Queen of Diamonds.