Princesses Behaving Badly: Real Stories from History Without the Fairy-Tale Endings

These 30 true stories of take-charge princesses from around the world and throughout history offer a different kind of bedtime story . . .

Pop history meets a funny, feminist point-of-view in these illustrated tales of “royal terrors who make modern gossip queens seem as demure as Snow White” (New York Post).

You think you know her story. You’ve read the Brothers Grimm, you’ve watched the Disney cartoons, and you cheered as these virtuous women lived happily ever after. But real princesses didn’t always get happy endings—and had very little in common with Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Belle, or Ariel.
 
Featuring illustrations by Wicked cover artist, Douglas Smith, Princesses Behaving Badly tells the true stories of famous (Marie Antoinette; Lucrezia Borgia)—and some not-so-famous—princesses throughout history and around the world, including:
 
• Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, a Nazi spy. 
• Empress Elisabeth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who slept wearing a mask of raw veal. 
• Princess Olga of Kiev, who slaughtered her way to sainthood.
• Princess Lakshmibai, who waged war on the battlefield with her toddler strapped to her back.
 
Some were villains, some were heroes, some were just plain crazy. But none of these princesses felt constrained to our notions of “lady-like” behavior.