Last December I visited to Vienna, and almost immediately upon arrival it became clear that someone called Sissi was going to be the defining figure of my visit.

Sissi, if you are not familiar, is the nickname of Empress Elizabeth, who lived between 1837 and 1898 and ruled as Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary from her marriage aged 16 until her death by assassination aged 60.

Her image – particularly the 1865 portrait, in which she wears a beautiful white and silver ballgown and star-shaped jewels in her long dark hair – is everywhere in Vienna, as is her name. In the lively coffee shops with their red plush seats and gold fittings you can sit until midnight eating Sissi cake. When you visit any of the royal palaces you are assured that for best value for money you should buy the Sissi Ticket. At the Hofburg Palace the main tourist attraction is the Sissi Museum, which ‘illustrates the true personality of the frequently misunderstood Empress’.

My interest was piqued in the first room of the Sissi Museum. Sissi, the audio tour informs us, is today an ‘international icon’. “But did you know that Sissi was a complicated figure during her life, and only became an icon to the Austrian people after her death?”

No, I did not know that.

As I proceeded through the museum, I was more and more struck by the many similarities between Sissi’s life and that of Princess Diana. To list them:

• Both Prince Charles and Emporer Franz Joseph originally intended to marry the elder sister, but preferred the younger sister when they met her.
• Franz Joseph met and fell in love with Sissi when she was 15, while Diana was 16 when she met Charles.
• Sissi was 16 when she married while Diana was 20 – both young, even in the context of their times.
• Both Sissi and Diana were seen at the time of their marriage as perfect brides because of their beauty, youth, innocence and noble lineage. In the immediate years after their marriage, they were celebrated publicly because of these qualities.
• However, both were reportedly shy and found the royal life difficult. Apparently Sissi struggled with the strict protocols of the Imperial Austrian court.
• Both women were seen as beauty and fashion icons throughout their lives and afterwards. The museum went into detail about how much Sissi valued her own beauty and the intense regimes she undertook to maintain it – including three hours a day dressing her hair and an entire day every fortnight to wash it. She also apparently ate very little, obsessively maintaining a low weight and an extremely small waist. It is speculated that Princess Diana also struggled with disordered eating. I would hazard a guess that both women wanted to be able to control this aspect of their lives when so much else felt out of their control.
• Both women withdrew from their husbands and royal duties in later life. Diana of course divorced Prince Charles and lost her HRH title. Meanwhile, Sissi spent long periods travelling abroad separately from her husband, who adored her from afar. Every time she returned home she became ill with migraines, fever, sickness, exhaustion and nervous breakdowns, leading to historical speculation that her illness was partly stress-related and psychosomatic.
• Both women died younger than they should have – Diana aged 36, Sissi aged 60 – in violent circumstances. Sissi was fatally stabbed with a sharpened needle file by an Italian anarchist. 
• Both deaths initiated an outpouring of public grief and immediately elevated the women to icon status in their own countries and across the world.

This last similarity made me think of the famous Edgar Allen Poe quote, from an 1846 essay: ‘The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.’

I do not need to detail here how much women, around the world, throughout history and in every different artform, have been and still are reduced to their outward appearance and made into objects to be observed, commented upon and acted upon. We know all that already.

The Poe quote above expresses it perfectly. The man is the poet; he is the one who speaks. He is active; he creates poetry. He is, presumably, listened to. His poetry becomes part of our collective understanding of the world; his story becomes history. The woman – who must be both beautiful and dead, those two most desirable characteristics – is reduced to the inactive object, the topic that he is speaking about.

This quote can be fruitfully applied to many different artworks and literature across the years, but here I want to use it to look at how we perceive royal women.

When Sissi and Diana died, they became frozen in time; beautiful, perfect, and still – no longing living and defying of their husbands and causing awkward scenes and breaking royal protocol. They froze, and became objects that we can learn about, and obsess over, and fantasize about. Their tragic lives became folklore, part of their national history, a juicy tale to tell. They became both larger and smaller than life, no longer living breathing difficult women but idols, icons, images that can be slapped onto a thousand products and beamed around the world. Deified, something at once more and less than a human being.

While I was first mulling over this blog post, Kate Middleton’s whereabouts became an internet obsession. It was mid-March, and she hadn’t been seen in public since Christmas Day. We’d been told that she was recovering from surgery, but we didn’t know enough details. Perhaps surgery was a cover story for something more sinister – marriage breakdown, divorce, domestic abuse? Was she on the run, uncooperative or dead? Was Kate about to become another Diana, a beautiful dead tragic victim of a royal melodrama? Suddenly, she became so much more interesting.

According to biographer Sally Bedell Smith, Elizabeth II said that, as queen, she had to be ‘seen to be believed’. The truth of these words became clear when both Charles and Kate retired from public view due to health issues. It only took a few months for public attention to whip up into a frenzied PR crisis. It’s not enough for us to be told that the royals are there. We need to see them with our own eyes, regularly, smiling and reassuring. They must be objects for us to view, their outward appearances of paramount importance.

Out of the many thousands of articles written in the days after the death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, one in particular struck me at the time. Unfortunately, because of the sheer volume of content from that period and my own hazy memory, I have been unable to find it since then to credit the author.

I remember that this article commented that the majority of the most successful monarchs of stable and productive periods of British history have been women; referring, of course, to Elizabeth I, Victoria and Elizabeth II. The latter two enjoyed the two longest reigns of a British monarch, while Elizabeth I takes a respectable ninth place. These three rulers presided over relatively stable periods of economic and cultural development.

Most interestingly, the article argued that there is something about a female monarch that allows national pride to flourish. A queen does not threaten or alter our shared understanding of our country with her own opinions or decisive actions, but by displaying herself regularly before the public gaze she becomes a peaceful, passive idol for us to unite underneath. Remember that Elizabeth II was famed and celebrated for never making her political opinions known. Think about the fact that ships are called ‘she’ or that we visualise Britainnia, the personified Britain, as a triumphant woman. The image of a queen provides a focal point for our love, our service, our devotion. Like Poe’s beautiful dead woman, she cannot stop herself from being spoken about, used as a metaphor, or loved. But for that to work, we have to see the queen regularly. Dead or alive, we have to know she is there.

Even France and the USA, those champions of anti-monarchy, have their own Lady Liberties to unite their national pride.

I remember a lecture at Cambridge in which the professor drew our attention to how Elizabeth I was painted. Although she is covered and surrounded by symbols of power, at the centre her face is a white oval. Her features faint, the space is almost empty – a blank. We can fill it in, imagine it, project our own values onto it, lay our burdens and blame upon it. It doesn’t matter exactly who she is, it only matters that she is there.

Sissi’s assassin even said that he did not think of himself as having killed a woman.

I came to Geneva to kill a sovereign […] it did not matter to me who the sovereign was whom I should kill… It was not a woman I struck, but an Empress; it was a crown that I had in view.

Sissi had, in his mind, become successfully transformed into a symbol of power, an object to be acted upon.

One of my all-time favourite quotes about women in literature and in the public imagination comes from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets since the beginning of time […] Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

The stories of Sissi and Diana bring these ideas to life. Behind closed doors, their real lives were plagued by entrapment, anxiety, the weight of expectation, marriage difficulties, health issues, and the prioritisation of physical beauty. But in the public imagination – particularly after their deaths – they become ‘people of the utmost importance.’ Visit Vienna for a weekend and you’ll soon see how Sissi ‘pervades from cover to cover’ or ‘dominates the lives’ of the Austrian people. As for the British public, Princess Diana still holds a special place in many people’s hearts and in our national history. It would be hard to have any conversation about the monarchy without mentioning her name. But which would you rather be, the princess ‘in the fiction written by men’ – in the public imagination of a patriarchal society – or the real one?

A few years ago I placed a bet on the Grand National – not something I particularly recommend doing, but I felt compelled to because everyone else at my new job was doing it. That year, a female jockey won for the first time. Her name was Rachael Blackmore. Mere seconds after she won, a reporter asked her how it felt to be the first female winner. She replied, “I don’t feel male or female right now. I don’t even feel human.”

I think about this quote often because for me it perfectly sums up how frustrating it can feel to live in a world that was fundamentally shaped by patriarchy and is only just beginning to shake it off. It’s true that I am a woman, and my femaleness and femininity are, often, important parts of my life, my experiences and my personality. But very often it’s frustrating to be reduced to my gender when what I feel like, most of the time, is just another human being moving about the world trying to do my best. That’s what I would like others to see me as, first and foremost.

When I was learning about Sissi in Vienna I wondered whether she felt the same. She travelled incessantly in her later life, enjoying the journey more than the destinations themselves. She said, “If I arrived at a place and knew that I could never leave it again, the whole stay would become hell despite being paradise.” That restlessness makes it seem as though she was almost on the run – on the run from being observed, from the public eye, from feeling trapped in her own body, her life that felt like it belonged to the public more than it did to her.

Her assassin found her because a newspaper revealed the fake name that she was travelling under – a tragic story of an attempt at privacy being violated by the media’s feeding an insatiable public appetite for information about this royal woman. The parallel to Princess Diana’s car crash while being chased by paparazzi is obvious.

When Kate Middleton was missing, some people wondered whether she had ‘pulled a Gone Girl’ – gone on the run from her daily life, from the entrapment of expectations, and leaving behind a PR bonfire for her undeserving husband to deal with.

It’s depressing to think that, for royal women, death isn’t an escape from being objectified by the morbid curiousity of public imagination. Instead, it’s only the beginning – out of the frying pan and into the fire, as they are frozen in time, solidified, made perfect in death, elevated to a constellation in the night sky of the national consciousness.

It’s enough to make anyone want to go on the run.

Bibliography

The Collateral Damage of Queen Elizabeth’s Glorious Reign by Sam Knight in The New Yorker

What ‘Kate-Gate’ tells us about the Faustian royal pact by Camilla Cavendish in The Financial Times

The Royal Family’s Kate Middleton Crisis by Tanya Gold in The Cut

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