Alexandra Petrovna Kropotkin was born on April 15, 1887, in
Bromley, London, where her family was living in exile. She was the sole child of anarchist luminary
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) and was named after his brother,
Alexander, who had committed suicide in Siberian exile the year prior. Her mother
Sophie was a Ukrainian Jewish lecturer and writer a decade younger than Kropotkin; the couple married in Switzerland in October 1878 while she was still a student.
The Kropotkins descend from an early medieval Russian ruler,
Rurik, but her father disowned his royal title of "prince" and was, in turn, disowned by his father. In their English exile, the family was socially prominent at the turn of the century and hosted salons on Sundays. Following the 1917
Russian Revolution, they returned to Russia, where Alexandra stayed until 1921. After her father's death, she settled in New York. Kropotkin, like her father, cared little for her royal title but used it to establish her American career with the byline "Princess Alexandra Kropotkin". She wrote "To the Ladies!", a regular column in the general interest magazine
Liberty from 1931 to 1942. She continued to write on cooking, home economics, etiquette, relationships, and other topics intended for women readers. Her Russian cookbook,
How to Cook and Eat in Russian, was reissued by
Scribner's in 1964 as
The Best of Russian Cooking.
The New York Times Book Review considered it the best cookbook on the subject. She also produced an English translation of
Crime and Punishment, a revised English edition of
The Brothers Karamazov, and Russian translations of several
George Bernard Shaw plays. == Personal life ==