The Mad Monk's Daughter: The Many Mysterious Lives of Maria Rasputin

A new, riveting and definitive biography of Maria Rasputin--the daughter of the infamous Russian mystic who brought down an empire.

In THE MAD MONK’S DAUGHTER, Vanity Fair contributor and royals expert Hadley Meares unspools the largely overlooked story of Maria Rasputin, the daughter of the fame. Maria was born in Siberia, brought to St. Petersburg when she was thirteen to live with her father, and there she played with the Romanov princesses and became a favorite of the Empress Alexandra. When Maria discovered her father’s murdered body, she was harbored by the royal family until the Empress urged her to escape, and so began the many iterations of Maria Rasputin who steadfastly defended her father’s innocence and benevolence until she died. Maria became a wife, a cabaret dancer, a mother, a lion tamer in the Ringling Brothers Circus at the height of circuses in America. Later she worked as a laborer, a real life Rosie the Riveter. She met twice with Anna Anderson, the woman who famously claimed to be Princess Anastasia, and she ultimately fell into the hands of a journalist who wanted to trade on her very famous last name for a financial windfall that never quite materialized.

Maria Rasputin’s story is a story of survival, reinvention, celebrity, notoriety, and identity. Hers was a dark fairy tale life but also a testament to what a strong woman can survive and will into existence. By focusing for the first time on Maria’s point of view, THE MAD MONK’S DAUGHTER reveals a new side of the Romanovs and of Rasputin, humanizing them, and chronicles the aftermath of the fall of Russia for so many who fled. It also captures the prismatic nature of celebrity in our culture, and how the stories we tell about ourselves are the riddles we leave for the world to understand us.