Isabella of Parma was born in Madrid on New Year’s Eve, 1741, into a family that should have offered her every comfort. Her mother, Louise Élisabeth of France, was only fourteen years old when she gave birth, still practically a child herself. Her father, the Spanish prince Philip, left almost immediately for a military campaign and did not see his daughter again until she was eight. What followed was a childhood marked less by royal privilege than by coldness and punishment.
Louise Élisabeth, despite her enthusiasm for Enlightenment ideals, saw no contradiction in regularly beating her daughter for behaviors entirely natural to a young girl: running, jumping, talking loudly, or simply having fun. In her letters, she called the child a bore and described her as unbearable. Isabella’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, watched this treatment with horror and compared what was happening to military training. The only refuge Isabella found was inside her own imagination.
She learned to entertain herself in silence and to read the people around her with sharp precision, adapting to their expectations as a way of protecting herself and gaining some measure of control over her world. Over time, the lively and mischievous girl became a melancholic teenager who took deep pleasure in education and literature. In secret, she wrote treatises and essays on the place of women in society, on the equality of the female mind, on the unfairness of marriage of convenience, and on ethics, philosophy, world trade, and military affairs. The breadth of her thinking was astonishing for an eighteenth-century woman, and many of her ideas reached far beyond what her era would tolerate.
As Isabella grew older, her mother began negotiating a marriage that would improve the family’s status. For nearly a decade, she corresponded with Maria Theresa of Austria, who was equally determined to secure brilliant futures for her many children. By the middle of 1759, an arrangement was reached: Isabella would marry Archduke Joseph of Austria, the future Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. The union was meant to strengthen the bond between the Bourbons and the Habsburgs.
But Isabella’s mother did not live to see the wedding. She died of smallpox at the age of thirty-two. Isabella had never been loved by her mother and had received neither tenderness nor warmth from her, yet the news devastated her. She fell to her knees and prayed, asking God to reveal how much longer she herself had to live.
At that moment, a nearby clock struck four times. Isabella took the chimes as a sign and became convinced she would die at twenty-two. It was during this period of grief that she received her first letter from one of her future husband’s sisters, Maria Christina. The letter expressed joy at Isabella’s upcoming arrival at court and offered friendship.
For a lonely young woman desperate for affection, it was a welcome gesture. At the time, no one could have predicted the storm that would soon begin between them. In the autumn of 1760, Isabella traveled to Austria to become Joseph’s wife. The two had never met.
Joseph admitted he was more afraid of the wedding than of war. When he finally saw his bride and discovered she was beautiful, he felt an incredible sense of relief and immediately fell in love with her. Isabella, who had spent her childhood learning how to play whatever role was expected of her, set about winning over her new family within days. She showed her husband that she considered him far more intelligent than herself, which pleased him greatly.
Around her mother-in-law, she carefully concealed her feminist ideas and behaved with such modesty and obedience that Maria Theresa described her new daughter-in-law as nothing less than ideal. The French ambassador spoke of Isabella as someone with an unrivaled gift for making people love her. But in that enormous palace, there was only one person with whom Isabella could truly be herself: her husband’s sister, the same Maria Christina who had offered her friendship in that first letter. Known as Mimi within the family, Maria Christina was her mother’s favorite, a fact that caused jealousy among her siblings.
She was light-hearted and lively, a balance to Isabella’s calmer, more reserved nature. The two were nearly the same age and shared many interests, especially painting. At first, their relationship looked like a typical aristocratic friendship. They exchanged small notes addressing each other as my dear sister.
But as time passed, the correspondence became noticeably more intimate. Isabella began referring to herself as Mimi’s lover, while Mimi asked Isabella to call her her washcloth, hinting at the closeness of one body against another. Some of the lines were strikingly explicit: I kiss thine archangelic little ass. I kiss you with all my strength.
I kiss your lovely ass while being careful not to offer you mine. Historians have debated what these letters actually meant. Some see too many hints to dismiss them as mere friendship between relatives. Others argue that this kind of passionate correspondence was common among women of the time, a rare outlet for self-expression in an era that forbade them so much.
Isabella herself wrote that she did not feel attracted to men, but she was deeply religious and may not have allowed herself to cross certain boundaries. Whatever the true nature of their feelings, the two women were unmistakably bound to each other. Isabella had been brought to Vienna to give the dynasty heirs, which meant she still had to share a bed with her husband. Joseph was never the subject of those tender letters; in Isabella’s correspondence, he was usually referred to simply as the Archduke.
Joseph, unaware of her true feelings, remained deeply in love with her. At the end of 1761, Isabella became pregnant. The news delighted everyone except her. The pregnancy was difficult both physically and emotionally.
She was terrified of childbirth, afraid of the pain, and haunted by her belief that she was destined to die young. On March 20, 1762, she gave birth to a daughter, named Maria Theresa after her grandmother. But the young mother never seemed to accept the child. She never mentioned her little girl in her letters, and her friends at court noticed that whatever love she may have felt, she did not show it outwardly.
Isabella had barely recovered from her first difficult pregnancy when, six months later, she became pregnant again and lost the baby. Maria Theresa urged her son to give the young woman time to recover, but before long Isabella was pregnant once more, and once more she lost the child. She had always been prone to melancholy, but now she sank into a severe depression. She could sit for hours staring blankly at a single point.
Some historians have suggested she may have suffered from a form of bipolar disorder, possibly hereditary, since her parents were first cousins and there had been cases of insanity in their family. She grew frighteningly thin, developed a dry cough, and began suffering from pain in her sides. Gradually, she became obsessed with death. She told her mother-in-law, Death speaks to me in a distinct voice that rouses in my soul a sweet satisfaction.
She even admitted she had thought about leaving this world herself but had stopped only because she was a devout Christian and believed God would not accept her soul. In the spring of 1763, Isabella became pregnant for the fourth time. This pregnancy went surprisingly well, and everyone believed she might be carrying twins. Isabella did not share their optimism.
She was convinced death was approaching. As the family prepared to leave their summer residence, she said goodbye to her sofa and her room, saying she would never see them again. This time, her premonition did not fail her. Just four days after the family returned to the Winter Palace, Isabella developed a fever, and it soon became clear she had smallpox.
The fever brought on premature labor, and she gave birth to a baby girl. She asked that the child be named Maria Christina. The little girl did not survive even a full day. Isabella followed her daughter four days later, dying only a month before her twenty-second birthday, fulfilling the prophecy she had believed in for years.
The grief of the entire family was overwhelming. Joseph wrote to Isabella’s father, I have lost everything. My beloved wife, the object of all my tenderness, my only friend is no longer with me. For Joseph, Isabella remained one of the most important women in his life forever.
He showed great love toward their surviving daughter and remarried only because his mother insisted. His second wife, Maria Josepha of Bavaria, whom Joseph believed inferior to Isabella in every possible way, was met with coldness and rejection. She too died of smallpox just two years after their wedding. After that, Maria Theresa carried out what was considered a remarkably bold experiment for the time and performed the first procedure that somewhat resembled vaccination.
Maria Christina also struggled deeply with the death of the woman who had been either her closest friend or perhaps her beloved. She kept a portrait of Isabella and her daughter in her prayer book for the rest of her life. On the back was written: Portrait of my dear sister-in-law Isabella and her only daughter. The former died in 1763 at the age of 21 on November 27th.
Mourning from all over the world, but above all by me, who has lost the best and truest friend I have ever had in the world. While grieving, Maria Christina received a visit from an old acquaintance, Prince Albert of Saxony. His support and companionship became a great comfort, and gradually feelings grew between them. From Maria Theresa’s point of view, Albert was a questionable match.
He was only the third son of the Polish king, with no lands and no real power. But Maria Christina was her mother’s favorite and was allowed to marry for love. Albert was given the duchy of Teschen, and the wedding went ahead despite the court still being in mourning after the death of Maria Christina’s father. Her siblings, many of whom had been forced into marriages with people they barely knew, were not thrilled.
Though the marriage was not always easy, the couple remained together until Maria Christina’s death at sixty-five. She outlived her friend Isabella by thirty-four years. Isabella’s story is that of a soul that ended up in the wrong place and the wrong time. In an era that offered women no freedom and no voice, she was forced to hide her true self for most of her short life.
She was a gifted, deeply misunderstood princess whose brilliance and longing were never allowed to find their place in the world she was born into.
