About the Author

Susan Nagel is the bestselling author of Mistress of the Elgin Marbles and a critically acclaimed book on the novels of Jean Giraudoux. She has written for the stage, screen, scholarly journals, and Town and Country. She is a professor in the humanities department at Marymount Manhattan College and lives in New York City.

Reviews

"The woman in these pages emerges...as a veritable prototype of saintly Catholic forgiveness." --The Atlantic Monthly "In Marie-Thérèse, Child of Terror, Susan Nagel...faces the challenge of turning this largely unknown and fairly unsympathetic historical figure into a lively biographical subject....[Nagel] does capture the peculiar humanity of her subject as she evolved from princess to prisoner to decorous matron." --Valerie Styker, New York Times Book Review "Gripping....providing new insights into a misunderstood and tragic figure and showing us the real human buffeted by all those historical crosscurrents." --Martin Rubin, Washington Times "A fascinating, readable, and engrossing book that should interest general readers and scholars alike." --Library Journal, starred review "This highly detailed, exhaustively researched, often riveting account will appeal especially to all those readers who've immersed themselves in the many recent books about Marie Antoinette" --Booklist, starred review "Relates the dramatic highs and lows experienced by the woman known as Madame Royale....highly detailed and sympathetic." --Publishers Weekly "Enlivened by intriguing asides about the young Marie-Thérèse, such as the special sign language she developed to communicate with her parents in prison and the impact on her own development of her mother's bravery in the face of the French Revolution." --Kirkus Reviews "Masterly and compelling...a triumph." --Tina Brown, author of the Diana Chronicles "Few historical tales can match the family drama of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Beheaded in 1793 during the French Revolution, they left behind a daughter, Marie-Therese, who did everything she could to help restore the Bourbons to the throne. Author Susan Nagel puts to rest most of the doubts about the Bourbons (Was Therese the legitimate daughter? Did her brother the dauphin really die in Temple Prison?) via a thorough analysis of DNA samples and handwriting in family letters. But the best part of the tale isn't the clarification of the historical record--it's the engaging portrait Nagel paints of a young woman who gave up everything for the love of France and her family." --Virtuoso Life "Taking one of those fascinating lives that have remained too long untold, Susan Nagel's Marie-Therese is a well-researched, entertaining and often poignant biography that recreates royalty, terror, tragedy, revolution, and restoration with verve and vividness." --Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of the Red Star