Thank you NetGalley and Viking for the review copy of Veronica Buckley’s very interesting book “Seven Sisters.”
Pretty much everyone knows who Marie Antoinette was, but what about her sisters? Were you aware that she even had sisters? I figured she did as she came from a royal family, but I couldn’t tell you more than that. As it happens, she had ten sisters. Five of them died in childhood, but that means there were four others that popular history seems to have forgotten. In fact, if you do a search for “daughters of Maria Theresa of Austria,” Marie Antoinette comes up first.
In “Seven Sisters,” Veronica Buckley introduces readers to the daughters of Austria. She tells us who they were, what they were like (based on surviving correspondence), and what role they played—willingly or otherwise—in their mother’s dynastic machinations.
One was permitted to marry for love: Maria Christina, her mother’s favorite, married Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen. Maria Carolina became Queen of Naples when she married King Ferdinand IV after replacing her dead sister Maria Josepha as his betrothed. We all know what happened to Marie Antoinette, who was known as “Maria Antonia” until her marriage to the French Dauphin. Maria Amalia had a wretched forced marriage with Duke Ferdinand of Parma; like her sister Christina she had expected to also be able to marry the man she loved. Due to a skeletal condition that affected her ribcage, the oldest daughter Maria Anna was never placed on the marriage market and eventually became an abbess, as did Maria Elisabeth, the family beauty whose marriage prospects disappeared after smallpox left its mark.
Buckley brings each woman to life on her pages. She shares their aspirations, hopes, and heartbreaks. “Seven Sisters” is the exploration of a powerful family peopled by singular individuals, a family whose descendants are still active in European politics today.
This is the Mask 
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