Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles

Translation of Maria Stuart

Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul, The Viking Press, New York.

The life of Mary Stuart, one of the tragic figures in the history of the world, who was so easily put into the hands of destiny by early "everything in earthly power" without being able to hold it, soon after her death experienced very different representations: from the "hymn who defended her like a saint" to the very opposite. She was—so much is certain—an attractive, passionate, intelligent, and proud woman, but probably less a queen than she still felt. "How was Maria Stuart? Was she really involved in her second husband's murder, was not she? "The case began to interest Stefan Zweig when he read a handwritten account of her execution at the British Museum in London. "I asked for a really reliable book. Nobody could tell me anything, and in such a searching and inquiring way I involuntarily got involved in the comparison and had started, without really knowing, a book about Maria Stuart..." Thus this admirably intuitive and at the same time largely objective novelistic biography was born.