Question about Abundance

[Ash]

I am reading this novel about Marie Antoinette, and am wondering if the letters that the author has her writing to her mother, and the Empresses response, were actual letters, or based on some facts, or pure imagination. Anyone have any idea?

[annis]

MA did write extensively to her mother, Maria Theresa. Some of the leters are in the public domain - here's one on the internet Archive (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1773marieantonette.html)

There's an interesting article here (http://www.montana.edu/wwwvr/activities/activities04/Antoinette.html) about research Todd Larkin did for his book "Marie-Antoinette and Her Portraits: The Politics of Queenly Self- Imaging in Late Eighteenth-Century France."

He visited the Hapsburg castles in Innsbruck and the Staatsarchiv (State Archive) in Vienna where he was allowed access to the more than 200-year-old unpublished letters from Marie- Antoinette to her mother, Maria Theresa, the Empress of the Holy Roman Empire.

"I held these delicate letters in my hands and they were still sandy from the substance used to blot their writing ink," Larkin said. "As I got up from my chair I brushed away from my lap the blotter Marie-Antoinette had applied with her own hand." Larkin's work has led to insights into a complex woman. Raised to be the future queen of France, she was only 14 when she left her family and powerful and influential mother in Austria to marry the crown prince of France. Four years later she became queen when her husband was crowned King Louis XVI.

"She was a young woman to have so much power." Early on, Larkin says, "She says things that are so innocent." And, her reputation for style and beauty was acquired, Larkin learned. "At first her mother writes her that she needs to take better care of herself," Larkin says. "Her mother comments about her dirty clothes, hair and teeth. So Marie-Antoinette employs the French fashion industry to help her and she becomes interested in her appearance."

[boswellbaxter]

There are a lot of extant letters between Marie Antoinette and her mother--dealing with her difficulties in getting pregnant, her general conduct, and the like. Antonia Fraser quotes from some of them in her biography of MA

[Miss Moppet]

I would guess the passages were based on actual letters because, as BB and Annis have said, so much of the Marie Antoinette-Maria Theresia correspondence survives. MA's letters were reprinted more than once in the nineteenth century but none of these compilations can be completely relied upon for several reasons:

1. People forged her letters in the nineteenth century because they knew a Marie Antoinette letter would fetch a high price. There is still debate about whether Marie Antoinette's last letter (http://teaattrianon.blogspot.com/2007/05/last-letter-of-marie-antoinette.html), dated from the early hours of the day she died, is in fact a forgery. (If so it's a very good one).

2. Some of the letters were expurgated by the editors, or had passages or words effaced by later owners. This particularly applies to any discussion of MA's marital sexual problems and her relationship with Axel Fersen.

The most recent authoritative edition of the letters is Evelyne Lever's (http://www.amazon.fr/Correspondance-Marie-Antoinette-1770-1793-Evelyne-Lever/dp/2847341978) but it's not complete by any means. It's got the most well known stuff so this is my first port of call when I want to check something I think MA said.

Olivier Bernier edited a translation of parts of the MA/MT correspondence (http://www.amazon.com/Imperial-Mother-Royal-Daughter-Correspondence/dp/0283993421). I bought this years ago after reading Jean Plaidy's The Queen's Confession (a fictional MA autobiography) and becoming curious about how much of it was based on the letters, which were frequently quoted from and referred to (answer: a lot). The Bernier book also includes IIRC letters between MT and her ambassador Mercy-Argenteau, who essentially acted as a spy reporting back to MT on everything MA didn't want her mother to know. Curiously MA never seems to have realised it was the ambassador who was shopping her to MT.

I do have the Bernier book in the loft so if there's anything you are particularly curious about, Ash, post it with the approximate date and I'll see if I can find it.

[Ash]

Thanks guys - I forget sometimes, when letter writing was the only means of long distance communicatio, how flowery and detailed the prose was, so I wondered if it was the author's prose. Apparently not. What I suspect Im going to find is that the voice of the letters change as she gets older, which would make them authentic, as its something thats hard to pull off as a writer.(and moppet, I may take you up on that, thanks!)

[annis]

I sometimes wonder what future biographers and writers of historical fiction will do without letters to refer to. People of present times communicate in such transitory ways, they will leave little recorded personal information/communication behind.

[Ash]

And what books are going to get written by some young thing who finds her grandmother's/great aunts/local crazy lady's diary/letters and then writes a book about it. Or, more likely, what child with a deceased parent is going to find a whole new side of said parent when they discover his/her love letters from another lover.....Its not going to happen. Sad.

Actually, we found the letters between my mom and dad when he was stationed overseas during WWII. Very cool find. I think future generations are going to miss out on stuff like this.