Elisabeth of Austria

Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898), known as Sisi, became one of the most recognizable consorts in European history, though she spent much of her life evading the role. A daughter of Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria and Princess Ludovika, she belonged to a junior branch of the Wittelsbachs and was raised with unusual informality at Possenhofen on Lake Starnberg. In 1853 Emperor Franz Joseph I, her first cousin, was expected to propose to her elder sister Helene; he chose the fifteen-year-old Elisabeth instead, and the couple married in Vienna in April 1854.

Court life under the supervision of her aunt and mother-in-law, Archduchess Sophie, proved oppressive to her, and disputes over the upbringing of her children strained the marriage. She bore four: Sophie, who died in infancy in 1857; Gisela; Crown Prince Rudolf; and Marie Valerie. From the 1860s Elisabeth increasingly absented herself from Vienna, traveling to Madeira, Corfu, Hungary, and England, and devoting exacting attention to her appearance, her riding, and her physical regimen. She learned Hungarian, surrounded herself with Hungarian attendants, and formed a close political friendship with Count Gyula Andrássy. Her sympathy for Hungary contributed to the climate that produced the Compromise of 1867, and she was crowned Queen of Hungary beside Franz Joseph that June; the Hungarian nation's coronation gift, the palace at Gödöllő, became her preferred residence.

The death of her son Rudolf at Mayerling in 1889 ended what remained of her public life. She wore black thereafter, traveled almost constantly under loose incognito, and wrote melancholy verse modeled on Heine. Her relationship with Franz Joseph settled into an affectionate distance; she encouraged his friendship with the actress Katharina Schratt.

On 10 September 1898, while walking to a lake steamer in Geneva, Elisabeth was stabbed with a sharpened file by the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni, who had been seeking a prominent victim. She died within the hour, aged sixty. She was buried in the Capuchin Crypt in Vienna. In the twentieth century her image was extensively romanticized in film and popular literature, a posthumous celebrity considerably at odds with the reclusive figure of her later years.