The well-known fact is that the Empress hated Alexandra as the young Grand Duchess was pretty and had fabulouis jewellery collection as well as enourmous dairy.
I'm never sure whether these stories were genuine or just court gossip. The Grand Duchesses usually didn't fit well into foreign courts when they had to take any but the first rank - they were brought up to believe themselves the creme de la creme, they had huge dowries and splendid jewels, and were conditioned by the Russian court to expect everyone else to give way to them, sometimes quite inappropriately. Their religion of course was usually different from that of the court they married into, which again singled them out. They generally seemed to be unaware of the antagonism they aroused, since of course they were usually fairly young when they married and pretty naive about other courts, and often attributed the hostility of the royal families and courts they married into to the sort of jealousy Svetabel describes. The lack of enthusiasm at the British court for Maria Alexandrovna, who married the Duke of Edinburgh, was sometimes sometimes laid at the door of the wonderful jewels which outshone those of her sisters-in-law, but actually it was the fact the Russian court pushed for her to be given a higher rank than she was entitled to as the wife of a younger son of the sovereign which did the damage (she certainly did not outshine her sisters-in-law in looks!). I could see the same sort of irritation might occur at the Vienese court. The Empress Maria Theresa, daughter of that very tough cookie Maria Carolina of Naples, doesn't really sound the sort of woman to be jealous of a sister-in-law without provocation, but she does sound like the sort of person who would keep a very junior brother-in-law's wife in her place. Alexandra sounds a nice young woman but she was 16 when she married and probably not very clued up to a court like that of Vienna which was very different from Russia and where she was pretty far down the pecking order - and they thought themselves quite as important as anyone from a jumped-up dynasty which didn't even have the same religion. She may well have quite innocently had expectations and feelings of entitlement relating to her rank which might have made her appear too big for her boots and caused a lot of hostility. And at Vienna, she was pretty far away from her family and she had no married elder sisters or relatives nearby - for example in smaller German courts - to help her adjust and smooth her path with the Austrians. Her sister Elena, at the court of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, seemed to have an easier time - it is noteworthy that she was married to the heir to the duchy so took the second rank after her mother-in-law and therefore didn't have to feel that she was being downgraded from her high position.
Do you mean that Swedish court envied the jewellery of MP-younger?
I don't know if that was what Marc meant, but it suggests that these sorts of stories persisted across the generations!
