DIANAWORLD

An exploration of the mythology and reality surrounding the doomed British royal.

Diana Spencer came into the orbit of the House of Windsor holding a strong hand: The Windsors were German, after all, but she could trace her English ancestry back for many centuries, with the result that there’s something to the saw that she was “more royal than the royals.” Notes biographer White, this isn’t quite so: “You can’t move for royal branches in the Windsor family tree.” Even so, Diana had good cause to rebuke Prince Charles, her misery-inducing husband, with the bitter words, “When I came here, I had my title. I don’t need your title.” As White notes, Diana’s distance from the Windsors brought her nothing but sympathy and the Windsors nothing but scorn—and to ensure that, Diana cultivated connections with tabloid writers and TV personalities that she might otherwise have had nothing to do with, “relationships…purely of convenience.” White charts Diana’s influence in several, beg pardon, realms: So closely was she watched as a fashion icon that long after her death, gift shops did a land office business in selling red sweaters dotted with a row of white sheep punctuated by a single black one, “as though they were official Diana merchandise.” Moreover, she did much to ease tensions between white Britain and the immigrant population by dating a Pakistani doctor postdivorce. Some of the corners of Dianaworld are a touch sordid, as with the conspiracy theory that held that she was about to expose British arms merchants, “naming and shaming those of her compatriots who profited from land-mines.” Yet those theories still have a hold on British popular culture, in which Diana, thanks to a statue unveiled in 2021, has morphed into “a quasi-religious figure, a Mary of the multifaith age.”

Devotees of the “People’s Princess” will revel in White’s explorations of the territory behind the curtain.