Ladies in the castle

The Hungarian nobility and gentry families, even if women were listed on the family tree, officially no longer followed female descent. However, it would be foolish to believe based on this that the ladies were not important, since generations could rise up or disappear forever in the abyss of memory through them. Our book follows the fate of high-ranking ladies, hoping that the portrait of the female inhabitants of the castles will make us understand what a special situation the female members of the elite were in before they won their full equality in society. We are taking a look at famous ladies whose lives defined the age, their careers can be well documented, and their special personalities lit up their surroundings like lanterns. Their fate provided models for their sisters-in-law and nieces, girlfriends and acquaintances, and even for commoners, people living in the bourgeois or peasant ranks. While their lives draw the main lines of Hungarian history, it also gives a glimpse into the everyday life of the castles and their lifestyles, which were sometimes radically different from the people of the modern age. The requirements for the preservation of wealth, the rules of etiquette, the centuries-old liturgies of the elite were everyday for them, but today's reader will surely come across their customs, parents and their children, the fact that husband and wife slept in separate rooms and bedrooms, and that marriages in the vast majority of cases it was not defined by natural affections. The sources of our book, diaries, memoirs, correspondence, and contemporary newspaper articles, give the characters of our book the opportunity to "speak for themselves" in the chapters about them.