Princesses Behaving Badly - Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

   2013; 301 pages.  Full Title : Princesses Behaving Badly: Real Stories from History without the Fairy-Tale Endings.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Historical Non-Fiction; Women in History; Biographies.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    It seems like the dream of almost every little girl nowadays is to be a princess.  With a tiara in her hair, a wand with a star on the end, a frilly, fluffy skirt, and with the dominant color being pink or purple.  Author Linda Rodriguez McRobbie blames this on the Disney marketing campaign – its movies, toys, Halloween costumes, and whatnot.   Who wouldn’t want to be Belle, Ariel, or Cinderella?

    For a historical princess, the reality was somewhat different.  Sons of a reigning king grew up to be rulers – the eldest became the next king, and the rest became dukes.  Daughters became a marketable commodity – usually to be utilized to create or strengthen a political alliance via an arranged marriage, and the gods forbid that any princess should ever dream of marrying for love, courting a commoner, or (worst of all) getting a divorce.

    After that, her sole purpose in life is to produce a male heir for the throne.  Extramarital affairs by both king and queen were tacitly permitted, provided of course, one used a bit of discretion when engaging in them.   And being a princess in a royal household was much better than being a peasant.  At least you usually got to spend daddy’s riches.

   Still, some princesses are just not cut out for a life like that.  They might prefer to lead an army, steal a throne for themselves, hatch some diabolic political plot, sleep around, party all night, or live la vida loca..

    Their royal parents might call it “marching to the beat of a different drummer” or “just a stage she’s going through”.  Linda Rodriguez McRobbie calls it Princesses Behaving Badly.

What’s To Like...

    Princesses Behaving Badly is divided into 30 short biographies of daughters born into royalty (or pretending to be) in empires all around the world and ranging in time from 1500 BC (Hatsheput) to still-living today (Gloria von Thurn und Taxis).

    Interspersed among those chapters are another 15 sections on diverse subjects such as Royal Family Incest (there were reasons for practicing it), Warrior women who weren’t quite princesses, Six Ways to Fake Princesshood (useful advice?), and various princesses about whom there just aren’t enough details to warrant a discrete biography.

    All told, there are probably about 50 women examined to various degrees here, of which I’d heard of only five: Boudicca, Anne Boleyn, Lucrezia Borgia, Princess Margaret, and one of the “Anastasia” pretenders.  As a history buff, I was in hog heaven.

    The 45 biographies and tangents are grouped into seven sections, namely:

        01.) Warriors

        02.) Usurpers

        03.) Schemers

        04.) Survivors

        05.) Partiers

        06.) Floozies

        07.) Madwomen

     Also included in each biography are portraits of each princess, a catchy title, and one-paragraph teaser intros for them.  All of those literary devices worked great.

    Some examples of the titles: “The Princess Who Slaughtered Her Way to Sainthood”, “The Princess who Kept Male Concubines in Drag”, “The Princess Who Didn’t Wash”, and “The Princess Who Caused a Bank Robbery”.  Do any of those tickle your fancy?

    As expected, there are tons of interesting trivia and historical minutiae.  One princess stalked a guy by the name of Cecil Rhodes who happens to be the namesake of both “Rhodesia” and the “Rhodes Scholarship”.  Hernando Cortés defeated the Aztecs not so much with superior armor and weaponry (which is what I was taught way back when), but by bringing along with him the smallpox plague. And, to my utter amazement, the British Secret Intelligence Service (“MI6”) once staged a bank robbery in order to recover some nudie photos of Princess Margaret that were being used to blackmail her.  At least that’s the rumor.

    Personally, I found Princesses Behaving Badly to be thoroughly entertaining and quite enlightening.  I was pleasantly surprised at the sheer number of bad-ass and outrageous princesses the author was able to come up with.

Kewlest New Word ...

Excoriated (v.) : censured or severely criticized.

Excerpts...

    Though she was petite – barely five feet tall – and delicate, Christina walked and talked like a man.  She strode around in flat shoes, swore like a sailor in a deep gruff voice, and tended to smack her servants around.  She slouched, preferred short skirts and trousers to overstuffed female fashions, and had no time or patience for things like embroidery and etiquette.  She was often too busy to comb her hair and none too keen on bathing (in her defense, no one really was back then).  (loc. 2182)

    Her health wasn’t the only thing fragile about Alexandra.  At age 23, the pretty, dark-haired princess was found walking slowly, carefully, bow-leggedly down the corridors of the royal palace.  When questioned by her worried parents, she claimed that as a little girl she had swallowed a full-size glass grand piano.  The princess was worried that if she bumped into something, the piano inside her would shatter and leave her in bloody shreds. (…)

    Gossips claimed that she also believed she had a sofa in her head.  (loc. 3546)

Kindle Details…

    The Kindle version of Princesses Behaving Badly currently sells for $10.99 at Amazon.  ANAICT, this is the only book offered at Amazon by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie..

 “You don’t want to behave like you’re 70 when you’re in your 20s.  And vice versa.”  (loc. 2933 )

    I have only one thing to quibble about in Princesses Behaving Badly.  I thought the decision to arrange all the princesses cited in any given section in chronological order, from oldest to most recent, worked quite well.  So I was a bit surprised that this wasn’t done with the 30 biographies as a whole.

    Instead, they’re arranged in sections, and this got to be just a tad repetitive at times.  For instance, we get five “princesses leading armies” in a row in Section 1.  After the third or fourth, the stories all seemed to sound the same.  But then we’re done with that category, and off we go to a list of a bunch of princesses who all grabbed the throne by force, and we never get to read about any other warring princesses

    I think it might be a bit more interest-holding to just present all thirty in chronological order, as was done in another anthology of biographies I read recently (reviewed here). I very much liked that arrangement.  Spreading those warrior women throughout the whole cast of noteworthy princesses keeps everything fresh.

    But I quibble.  Princesses Behaving Badly is a great book that kept my attention from start to finish, and fully deserving of a 9*/10 rating.

    9 Stars.  Interestingly, the book doesn’t fare so well at both Amazon (3.9 stars out of 5) and Goodreads (only 3.61 stars out of 5).  The main complaint seems to be that some reviewers felt that the “facts” and “sources” for a lot of the biographies were a bit "shaky".  Unfortunately, if a princess lived before the invention of the printing press, the chances of finding reliable details about her life etched in stone (literally) are slim.  To get some idea about this, go see how many rock-solid details you can find about the life of William Shakespeare.  They are few and far between (as Bill Bryson found out when he went to write a biography of The Bard), and Shakespeare lived in the relatively recent 1600’s.