Abundance

Abundance is a historical novel by the American writer Sena Jeter Naslund, published in 2006. It is a fictional autobiography of Marie Antoinette, who speaks in the first person throughout.

Marie Antoinette is a child of fourteen when her mother, the Empress of Austria, arranges for her to leave her family and her country and become the wife of the fifteen-year-old Dauphin, the future king of France. She comes of age in the most public of arenas, embracing her new family and the French people, and eager to be a good wife and a strong queen she shows her new husband nothing but love and encouragement even though he repeatedly fails to consummate the marriage, and in doing so fails to give her the child and heir that both she and the country want. Deeply disappointed and isolated in her own intimate circle, apart from the social life of the court, she allows herself to remain ignorant of the country's growing economic and political crises, and entrusts her confidence to her women friends, her music teacher, her hairdresser and the ambassador from Austria. The novel follows her from the gardens of Versailles to a prison cell.

The book gives an account of the queen from the inside, from her arrival in France as a girl to the isolation of her last years.