Empress Elisabeth of Austria, the wife of Emperor Franz Joseph and mother of the unfortunate Crown Prince Rudolf, engaged in poetry without the knowledge of her contemporaries, following in the footsteps of her deeply admired Heinrich Heine. The isolated fifty-year-old used these diary-like poems as a vent for various frustrations, simultaneously criticizing the Viennese court and the aristocratic society, indeed the monarchy as a whole, as outdated. Some of the unflinching, often provocatively bold statements made by the Empress regarding the inner workings of the Habsburg family and Austrian politics in the late 1880s contribute to the value of this source and justify its publication. For there is no historical source of similar significance from this period. The fact that these verses do not possess high literary value does not diminish their worth as a source.