THE COUNTESS, a fictive novel which tells the story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who is supposed to have been the serial killer of hundreds of servant girls. (I still think the numbers are exaggerated but even a dozen or two is extreme.) Rebecca John's book was truly engaging. Reading his book and the Urbarium about the same time, though the events in this book took place more than a hundred years earlier, helped me understand better what life was for Hungarian women of the high nobility at the time when Bathory lived. Women like those married to the men who were counted in that census.
Usually arranged to be married, never the less they still had poor relatives. They were often sent these poor relatives to work for them, to be educated a bit by working for the estate, or married off. In this book the servant girls are often sexual before marriage, depicted as eagerly seducible, even promiscuous, and maybe that was a fact of class difference, or perhaps that is only in the viewpoint of a woman whose marriage is arranged, but it is one of the reasons they are punished by her.
Clearly increasingly sadistic, but with faithful servants also cooperating or punishing the girls themselves, the Countess thinks that it is completely in her right to be so punishing, but even the high nobility has its limits about what punishment is, and the torture and death of a servant, while not unheard of, is still not common.
How long have the rumors been flying?
How many good excuses, and bad ones, does the Countess have before she is walled up in a room, where she lives a couple years until she dies, visited only by a confessor, who can't actually get any sorrow out of her?
Is she a sympathetic character? In my opinion, in some ways, she is.
A countess of wealth had to be excellent at managing an estate and often spent months at a time - sometimes years - without seeing her husband and actually having a relationship with him. The shifts of allegiances and power, at a time when Croation nobles are marrying with Hungarians and some Hungarians in Transylvania have a different notion of who should be ruling what, mean that a man really must be ready to battle physically if politicking isn't working in his favor.
There was a lot of research put into this book, so if you've been reading the Urbarium, or perhaps doing some personal family history or genealogy research, some of the noble surnames will sound familiar to you. Bathory's arranged marriage is history, as are the marriages of other nobles mentioned in the book.
After the death of her husband, his best friend who had agreed to look in on her, did, but he also slept with her and then didn't marry her, choosing instead a much younger woman without a dowry to her name. She is terribly embarrassed to have to beg money that was loaned by her husband to give her daughter a dowry and everyone suspects or knows that she has had this involvement and that the man will show off his new, nubile bride at the wedding. Perhaps it's her husband's best friend who also, finally, puts a stop to her violent aberrant behavior.
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