Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece is a biography of the late-nineteenth-century woman initially known as Princess Alice of Battenberg who married Prince Andrew and became Princess of Greece and Denmark. Born deaf, with her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, presiding at her birth, she went on to grow up in Germany, Greece, and England. Vickers contextualizes the princess's moments of triumph and despair within Europe's largely unstable political climate, wherein various royal legacies were undergoing rapid change.
After an idyllic childhood wherein she learned to accommodate different aspects of her disability, Princess Alice married Prince Andrew in 1903. The following years were filled with wars and long stretches in which her family was in exile. By her mid-thirties, nearly every condition of her life which had afforded her stability was dismantled by forces outside her control. Though the British side of her family prospered, the German side were thrown out of power, and many members of her family were publicly excoriated for having relationships with Russian royalty. Her husband took much of this blame, leading to their collective exile, which nearly included his political execution.
Princess Andrew's life shortly after was wracked with mental illness. After suffering from a trauma-related religious crisis, she was sent to a Swiss sanitarium and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, a psychoanalytic category that even today remains poorly researched or understood. Despite terrible odds, she managed to recover from her trauma and reconcile with her religious faith, devoting time to working for charitable causes in Greece and even helping to shelter Jews during the Holocaust. Her son and daughter-in-law, both English royalty, invited her to live out her final years in tranquility at Buckingham Palace.
Monday, November 14, 2016
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