"Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman" by Robert K. Massie, published by Random House, New York, 2011. Stated "First Edition," First Printing with '1' present in the digit line on the copyright page. The story of one of the truly great female rulers in History by an award winning historian.

Dust jacket with un-clipped original price on the front flap; hard boards with gold lettering on spine, 6.1/2" x 9.1/2"; 625 pages including Index + "About the Author" and "About the Type" + color and monochrome plates on glossy paper, very good / fine condition.

"The daughter of an impoverished aristocrat, Catherine was married aged 16 to Grand Duke Peter, heir to the throne of all the Russias, a feckless teenager with a weakness for drink. Catherine was only able to give him an heir by passing off her lover's son as his own. In 1762, Catherine rode out of St Petersburg at the head of an army to arrest her husband. Three months later she became sole empress of the largest empire on earth. She was 33 years old. She ruled Russia as a benevolent autocrat for 34 years, fighting the Turks abroad and rebellion at home, and shepherding her people through the upheavals of the French Revolution. She took on many lovers but gave her heart to General Potemkin, the foremost statesman of her time. She died in 1796 aged 67, revered by her people as 'our mother', praised by Voltaire as a philosopher, reviled by her enemies as the Messalina of the North and remembered in history as Catherine the Great."

"From this extraordinary life of great events, fabulous splendor and barbaric cruelty, Robert K. Massie has woven a thrilling narrative based on impeccable scholarship and a cinematic eye for detail."

"What Catherine the Great offers is a great story in the hands of a master storyteller." [The Wall Street Journal]

"Dense and detailed, enriched by pages of full-color illustrations, Massie's latest will transport history lovers." [People]

"[Massie] hasn't lost his mojo... A consistently nimble and buoyant performance...[Massie] has always been a biographer with the instincts of a novelist. He understands plot-fate-as a function of character, and the narrative perspective he establishes and maintains, a vision tightly aligned with that of his subject, convinces a reader he's not so much looking at Catherine the Great as he is out of her eyes... Juicy and suspenseful." [Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review]

Robert K. Massie (1929-2019) was an American journalist and historian. He devoted much of his career to studying and writing about the House of Romanov, Russia's imperial family from 1613 to 1917. Massie studied American history at Yale and European history at Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He was president of the Authors Guild from 1987 to 1991. His books include Nicholas and Alexandra, Peter the Great: His Life and World (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize for biography), The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea, and Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman.

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