Maria Theresa

New York: Viking Press, 1970. Second Printing. Hardcover. Very Good/Good-. Merlot-colored cloth boards with gilt titling on spine. Binding is tight. Interior is unmarked. Full-color pictorial DJ is edgeworn with tiny tears at head of spine. 8vo. BOOK INFO: When Edward Crankshaw's Maria Theresa was published in 1969, it was the first full length study of Maria Theresa to be written in English for sixty years. Called to the throne in 1740, at the age of twenty-three, Maria Theresa was wholly unprepared. The young queen found herself with a virtually nonexistent army at the head of a bankrupt and disaffected empire - an empire shortly to be set upon by half Europe...her only weapons were her charm, her unbreakable will, and her almost reckless courage. With these, and by her own immense exertions, she first held her powerful enemies at bay; then, choosing new advisers with astonishing skill, and discovering in herself a fund of commonsense amounting almost to genius, she instituted wide-reaching reforms which were to unify the Empire's bewildering mixture of lands and peoples, and bring it to the threshold of the revolutionary age. With all this she remained a wife and a mother - most touchingly so in her vast correspondence with her many children. Her intimate correspondence with her daughter, Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution is one of history's most touching and revealing sidelights. (--abridged from the endflap and online summary) Illustrated throughout with glossy B&W portrait pages. Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, 1717-1780, Austria--History--Maria Theresa, 1740-1780; Marie Antoinette; Habsburg