The appetite for Romanov lore is insatiable and this book trades on that fact - even with its title. The autumnal reference makes one automatically think of the final years of the Romanovs, those leading up to the massacre at Yekaterinburg in 1918, but in fact, Zeepvat's focus is the last 100 years of the Russian imperial reign. Hardly, at that stage, the mellow season of dying fall. Zeepvat, a historical consultant with Royalty Digest, starts in 1817 with the original Nicholas and Alexandra - he, Nicholas I, she, Charlotte, daughter of the King of Prussia (renamed for her conversion to Russian orthodoxy) and winds her way chronologically through the intricate web of arranged marriages among the royal houses of Europe, plus, of course, the illicit associations that characterise most imperial chronicles.
This is populist history, concentrating on the intimate and served up in digestible episodes (don't forget Zeepvat is also a tour guide). Each chapter is accompanied by the author's pen-and-ink sketches, which, along with Zeepvat's rather breathy writing style, lends the book an old-fashioned air. Rather like leafing through a Victorian lady's scrapbook. In truth, it is hard to feel much sympathy for many of these spoiled royal men, bolstered by their great belief in themselves and their divine right to rule. The women excite more sympathy. Often sold into strategic marriages when they were mere adolescents, their stories read like classic case histories of the 19th-century female predicament - powerlessness in thrall to autocracy.
The opening of the Russian state archives has made a wealth of royal imperial memorabilia available to the historical researcher, but there is not much that is new in Zeepvat's trawl through the Romanovs. However when she does stray off the well-trodden path, she unearths some interesting sideshows.
Perhaps most fascinating is the account of Princess Elena Petrovna, daughter of the King of Serbia, who married into the Romanov family in 1911. Caught up in the October revolution, Elena and her husband, Prince Ioann Konstantinovich, were exiled to the Urals. In June 1918, Elena travelled to Yekaterinburg to appeal to the local Bolshevik commissar for information about her two children, whom she had left behind in Petrograd. In her absence, her husband and several other Romanov cousins were executed and she was transported to Perm where she spent months in captivity. Eventually she escaped to Paris, the only Romanov to survive imprisonment by the Ural Bolsheviks.
She published her story, "J'etais a l'katerinburg", in a French magazine in the 1950s specifically to countermand the claims of Anna Anderson that she was Anastasia, but Elena's story received scant attention.
Although she would have been 16 years older than Anastasia, Elena's movements around Yekaterinburg and Perm at the precise moment when the Tsar's family was murdered may have fuelled the furious rumours and alleged eyewitness accounts of the time that one of the Romanov grand duchesses had escaped. Perhaps it was Princess Elena they had encountered?
It is such interesting historical off-cuts that sharpen Zeepvat's generally soft focus. Though perhaps their appeal is limited to committed Romanovophiles, a club to which this reviewer must admit membership.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and critic