"Considered at the time to have been the most beautiful princess in Europe, capable of arousing 'profane passions', Ella was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the daughter of Princess Alice of Great Britain and Grand Duke Louis of Hesse. Following the tragically early deaths of her youngest brother and sister and also that of her young mother. Ella spent some of the happiest years of her youth in Britain with her grandmother Queen Victoria. At 19, however, much against the wishes of the Queen, who disliked everything Russian, Ella became engaged to Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, the authoritarian younger brother of Tsar Alexander III. It was at their wedding that her younger sister, Alix, formed a love match with the future Tsar Nicholas II; an event which not only sealed the fate of both sisters, but that of the Imperial House of Romanov. Without these two marriages, the history of Russia might have been very different." "Following the assassination of her husband, Ella renounced society and, against considerable opposition, founded the first religious Order of its kind in Russia, working for the poor and destitute of Moscow. Though loved for her charitable works and pioneering achievements, Ella, like Nicholas, Alexandra and fourteen members of their family, met a brutal death at the hands of the Bolsheviks. At the height of the Russian Revolution, she was taken captive to Siberia where, having been clubbed with rifle butts, she was hurled alive into a disused mineshaft and left to die of her injuries. She was subsequently canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as the Holy Imperial Martyr Saint Elisabeth Romanova."--Jacket.