WHEEL OF FORTUNE
MARGARET OF AUSTRIA, by Jane de Iongh; Jonathan Cape, English price 18/-. HE Wheel of Fortune was for Margaret of Austria (1480-1531) a potent symbol which offered some explanation of the fate of princes. With this in mind, and after bitter experience,
she chose as her own motto the words "Fortune Infortune Fortune,’ and caused them to be traced round the walls of the church she built to house her husband’s body and her own, a last gesture of mediaval piety in a humanist world. For the first 23 years, her life, like that of any other printess, was manipulated to serve the end of personal power politics. Daughter of Maximilian I, married at three to the Dauphin and for 11 years educated in France, only to be jilted for a more advantageous match; married at 15 to the Infante of Spain and widowed within a year; she was married for the third time idyllically to Philibert the Handsome, Duke of Savoy, only to be widowed without issue two years later. Not surprisingly, she refused to consider matrimony thereafter, even to Henry VII of England, and devoted herself assiduously to her own game of politics as Regent of the country of her birth, the Netherlands. Here she fostered her brother’s orphans, marrying off her nieces with equal disregard of personal consequences, and educating the future Charles V of Spain. Emperor of the Old and New Worlds, Her death found her resigned and convinced, in an age of war, of the values of peace. First published in the Netherlands in 1941, this biography of a woman by a woman was written by Dr. de Iongh while she was working for the Underground. The distractions of her occupation have detracted little from the scholarship and insight of the portrayal. Against the extraordinary complexity of the political scene, the personality of her subject emerges as dynamic, resilient, artistic and pious, an effect to which a very skilful translation contri-
butes:
J.R.
T.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 804, 17 December 1954, Page 12
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332WHEEL OF FORTUNE New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 804, 17 December 1954, Page 12
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