Maria Alexandrovna

Born Princess Marie of Hesse in 1824, raised in piety and frugality after her mother's death when she was twelve, she married Tsesarevich Alexander at sixteen — daunted at first by the extravagance of Russian court life but young enough to grow into it wholly. When Alexander became emperor in 1855 and her mother-in-law died five years later, she stepped into public view: co-founding the Russian Red Cross Society, establishing Russia's first all-female schools, backing her husband morally through the abolition of serfdom, and lending her name to the Mariinsky Theatre and Mariinskyi Palace. Tube…