Grand Duchess George, A Romanov Diary
George, Grand Duchess of Russia. A Romanov Diary. First Edition. 1988. Book is in very good condition; dust jacket is in good plus condition—jacket shows edge tears, small chips, and creasing (typical of this title).
Before the First World War, Europe’s royal families formed a remarkably interconnected world, bound together by marriage, blood, and an often bewildering web of family relationships. Few people were better positioned to observe that world than Grand Duchess George of Russia. Born a princess of Greece and Denmark, related to the royal houses of Russia, Germany, and Great Britain, and later aunt to Prince Philip, she occupied a front-row seat to the final decades of Europe’s dynastic age. Written decades before its eventual publication, this memoir traces her life from the high noon of Queen Victoria’s Europe to the aftermath of the Great War, when one monarchy after another disappeared. Rich in personal recollection and illustrated with photographs from family albums, it offers a uniquely intimate perspective on a vanished world whose rulers often regarded one another less as foreign sovereigns than as cousins.
“There was . . . a rather amusing mixture of languages in our household. We [children] spoke Greek to each other, but English with our parents. My father and mother talked to each other in German.”
--Grand Duchess George