The Life and Death of Ella Grand Duchess of Russia

Described as the ‘most beautiful princess in Europe’, and a woman ‘capable of arousing profane passion’, this is the story of a woman whose life combined privilege and tragedy, love and riches, conviction and courage, humanity and inhumanity. A granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Ella was born Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine. At twenty, her marriage to the Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, who became the victim of terrorist assassination, like the marriage of her younger sister Alexandra to Tsar Nicholas II, was partly responsible for the fall of the Imperial House of Romanov. In her widowhood and against great opposition, Ella established the first convent community of its kind in Moscow. As the ordained abbess of the Order of Saints Martha and Mary, Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna worked tirelessly with the sick, needy, outcast, and untouchable inhabitants of the city’s slum districts. Brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks at the height of the Russian Revolution, Ella was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as the Holy Imperial Martyr Saint Elisabeth Romanova. This study is based on a wealth of original material, much of it previously unpublished, from the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, the Hesse State Archives in Darmstadt, the State Archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and the Russian State Historical Archives in St Petersburg.