Caroline Moorhead
The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe
A thrilling biography of Edda Mussolini--Benito Mussolini's favorite daughter, one of the most influential women in 1930s Europe--and a heart-stopping account of the unraveling of the Fascist dream in Italy, from award-winning historian and author of the acclaimed Resistance Quartet, Caroline Moorehead
Edda Mussolini was the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's oldest and favorite child. At 19, she was married to Count Galleazzo Ciano, Il Duce's Minister for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, the most turbulent decade in Italy's fascist history. In the years preceding World War II, Edda ruled over Italy's aristocratic families and the cultured and middle classes while selling Fascism on the international stage. How a young woman wielded such control is the heart of Moorehead's fascinating history. The issues that emerge reveal not only a great deal about the power of fascism, but also the ease with which dictatorship so easily took hold in a country weakened by war and a continent mired in chaos and desperate for peace.
Drawing on a wealth of archival material, some newly released, along with memoirs and personal papers, Mussolini's Daughter paints a portrait of a woman in her twenties whose sheer force of character and ruthless narcissism helped impose a brutal and vulgar movement on a pliable and complicit society. Yet as Moorehead shows, not even Edda's colossal willpower, her scheming, nor her father's avowed love could save her husband from Mussolini's brutal vengeance.
432 pages, 152 x 230mm, black & white, photographs, Hardcover, Harper, 2022
Product Code: 9780062967251
