The Price of Beauty: Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Goodwin’s The Fortune Hunter
by Bethany Latham
The loveliest woman in Europe. Such was the burden of Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary during the Victorian period. Known to those closest to her as “Sisi,” the Empress was born into the Bavarian royal family and, in 1854, married at age 16 to her cousin, Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria. She seemed to have everything life could offer: wealth, a doting husband, the love of the people, an heir for the throne, and matchless beauty. Yet Sisi was anything but happy.
Sisi’s upbringing had afforded a great deal of freedom, a commodity in short supply at the Hapsburg court. Oppressed by both court ceremony and a pathologically overbearing mother-in-law, Sisi sought refuge abroad. It is one such journey, to England in 1875 to participate in the Quorn Hunt, which forms the basis for Daisy Goodwin’s novel, The Fortune Hunter.
“I was given a jigsaw puzzle featuring the famous Winterhalter portrait of Elizabeth [sic] when I was a child, and I suppose the image must have imprinted itself on my imagination,” says Goodwin. “Thirty years later, when I started casting around for a new subject for a novel, she came into my head.”
Sisi developed what Goodwin calls a “cult of beauty.” It took two hours every morning to dress her ankle-length hair, which had to be tied to hooks at night to relieve its weight so the Empress could sleep comfortably. Her obsession with tiny waist size resulted in a brutal exercise regimen, tight-lacing, and frequent fasting. She was known for wearing masks of raw veal to aid her complexion. “But her image came at a price,” says Goodwin. “She found the aging process very painful. She refused to sit for photographs from the age of thirty-two.” Sisi also possessed a great passion for hunting, and it is one of the novel’s predominant themes: “Hunting was the extreme sport of the nineteenth century. It was a way for royalty and aristocracy to let off steam and escape the formality of their lives. Unusually, hunting was a pastime where men and women were on equal terms. It is clear from the literature that hunting at that time was about the thrill of the chase, in every sense.”
It is the fox hunt which provides an entrée to the Empress for George “Bay” Middleton, a dashing young cavalry officer selected to be her pilot (guide). Goodwin notes that “rumor at the time was that they were having an affair,” and her novel centers upon this incident. “I started off writing about Sisi, but found myself feeling rather restricted by that.” So Goodwin has given the novel a threefold structure – equal page space for Sisi, Bay, and Bay’s fiancée, Charlotte. Goodwin needed to have an “independent” character, and once she “fixed on” Charlotte and “gave her an interest in photography, the whole book started coming together.”
This love triangle is set against Victorian mores, but Goodwin also draws parallels with today’s ceaseless media scrutiny of royalty, comparing Sisi to the former Princess of Wales, Diana. “Both women used and were ultimately destroyed by their love affair with fame. Sisi used her image to great effect, but that is a curse as well as a blessing. She dreaded the moment when another younger, more beautiful woman would replace her.” Though she attempted to travel incognito, this was impossible, and it was her fame which allowed an Italian anarchist to easily discover her identity and assassinate her in Switzerland in 1898.
Sisi’s life held other tragedies, both great and small: she was disenchanted with her husband. She suffered the death of a daughter, and also the death of the heir to the throne, the unstable Rudolph, in an apparent murder-suicide known as the Mayerling Incident. And it is this isolated Empress, whom Goodwin calls “a fascinating character,” which The Fortune Hunter showcases: a complex, exacting woman who nevertheless is tragic in her loneliness and unhappiness – proof positive that the price of beauty can be unbearably high.
The Fortune Hunter is published by St. Martin’s, 2014, $26.99/$31.00CAN, hb, 480pp, 9781250043894 / Headline Review, 2014, £14.99, hc, 480pp, 9780755348091
About the contributor: BETHANY LATHAM is HNR’s Managing Editor.
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Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 69, August 2014
