Olga Romanov’s life was largely unremarkable with one exception: her older brother was Nicholas, the last Tsar of Russia.

The youngest child of a loving father and a distant mother, she was raised in incomparable wealth in Russia’s most opulent palaces. And while home life had its drawbacks – they might have been rich, but Olga’s sleeping arrangements consisted of a cot with one flat pillow in a dorm-like room – the young princess was blessed with a pleasant disposition and an adaptable attitude.

And that was fortunate because when she was in her mid-30s, the Communists overthrew the monarchy. Fleeing from one part of her family’s former empire to another, Olga and her husband eventually settled in a farmhouse in her mother’s native Denmark. Another royal might have resented the slide from princess to near-peasant, but Olga embraced the transformation, according to Phenix, who is assistant editor of the Imperial Russian Journal. In Denmark, while raising two sons, the last Grand Duchess rose early to paint, bicycled into town for supplies, and picked mushrooms for soup.

She would have stayed there, Phenix asserts, except that in 1948 the Soviet government suspected her of helping Russian émigrés escape repatriation, and the Danes, fearful of upsetting a powerful neighbour, said they could no longer guarantee her safety.

Whether Olga actually did anything wrong isn’t clear: Phenix doesn’t have proof, a shortcoming that occurs often enough in this biography that readers will wonder whether Olga’s story would have been better served by a more skilled researcher, or whether there’s just not that much detailed information about her. Which raises the question of why Olga deserves a biography: Much of what’s here has been covered in other books.

Olga and her husband settled in Ontario, where Phenix details a life sure to delight anti-monarchists: the 66-year-old and her husband again tried their hand at farming, but for extra cash she sold her paintings at Eaton’s and her royal trinkets to wealthy Toronto matrons.

It’s sad, but what makes it even sadder is that, despite Olga’s good and generous nature and Phenix’s obvious affection for her, her story is, ultimately, not terribly compelling.