Marie Antoinette “tells her own story” in this “sage, mercurial, and ravishing” novel (The New Yorker)
Versailles tells the story of an expansive spirit locked in a pretty body and an impossible moment in history. As the novel begins, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette is traveling from Austria to France to meet her fiancé. He will become the sixteenth Louis to rule France, and Antoinette will be his queen—though neither shows a strong inclination toward power, politics, or the roles they have been summoned to play. Antoinette finds herself hemmed in by towering hairdos, the xenophobic suspicion of her subjects, the misogyny of her detractors, and the labyrinthine twists and turns of the palace she calls home.
At once witty, entertaining, and astonishingly wise, this widely acclaimed novel is an enchanting meditation on girlhood, womanhood, architecture, and—above all—time and the soul’s true journey within it. Shaken free of the dust of history and calcified myth, Antoinette is “very much alive here, and she’s magnificent” (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review).
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“Elegant. . . . A Rich and strange meditation on the girl whose destiny was to be misunderstood by her people and by history.”—Katharine Weber, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“[Davis] gives us the imagined inside of events, the stuff of true art.”—David Guy, The Washington Post Book World
“Kathryn Davis brings a careful hand and a clear eye to this complicated subject to create a portrait of a life that has been shaken free from history’s daunting mythology.”—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books