Joan Haslip (1912–1994)

I've been dragging through this dreary biography for what feels like an eternity (rather than quitting) for a few reasons 1) I engaged to read this with several friends here on LT but bought the wrong biography 2) Lady Hester Stanhope was a truly fascinating woman of the Regency era, Pitt's niece, and 3) I'm a completist, darn it all. In brief LHS left England after Pitt died. She had served as his hostess when he was PM and had adored him. She ended up in the Middle East, partly by design, partly by happenstance (like a shipwreck) and never left. There she indulged her eccentricities, as Haslip puts it, and over time besides becoming utterly indigent by generous overspending became more and more isolated in her mountaintop home, Djoun.

I researched a little and the consensus is the Haslip, while dated and while not providing notes or a bibliography, does state the facts and details accurately. However, her theories, judgements and conclusions about the whys and wherefors of LHS's behaviours and choices are hopelessly dated and are also totally inconsistent. Was LHS mad or was she not? Was she a kind and thoughtful person or wickedly cruel? Haslip doesn't have, for example, the psychological tools to examine LHS's behaviour from a more compassionate stance other than that she was an undisciplined and arrogant aristocrat who operated on whims and impulse, uneducated and brilliant. All true, but there is no depth in that evaluation. And her sex life! Who knows? Haslip is fabulously unclear. The original was written in 1926 and, for reasons I cannot fathom, republished in 2006. Anyway, my advice is, if you are interested in LHS and you should be! don't read this bio, find a better one! **… (más)

Charming and interesting. Haslip portrays the long sad but endearing story of the romantic friendship between Emperor Franz Josef and Katharina Schratt, a leading actress in the most prestigious theatre company in Vienna.

There were several aspects of this somewhat familiar story that were "new" to me. I had not been aware that the beautiful (and doomed) Empress Elizabeth was tremendously supportive of her husband's infatuation for Miss Schratt - and that the two women formed a friendship based upon their relationship with the Austro-Hungarian Emperor. It's as if the Empress appreciated Katharina for providing some feminine quality of suppleness and passivity to the Emperor that the she - Sisi - did not possess.

I also had not been aware that Katharine Schratt was a correspondent and close friend of the Bulgarian ruler "Foxy Ferdinand," to the point where Franz Joseph was occasionally jealous of Katharina's flirtatious behavior with the Balkan King. Ferdinand seems to have been genuinenly fond of the theatrical diva, and was also willing and able to use her as a conduit to influence Austro-Hungarian policy in southeastern Europe. (Stephen Constant's biography of Ferdinand does not include any mention of Schratt, so I'm not sure how well-known Schratt's role is to Balkan historians.)… (más)