Nicola Shulman at Literary Review:
‘Always be nice to girls, you never know who they’ll become’ was a common saying among the generation of upper-class Englishwomen born around 1900. Diana Spencer’s life was a spectacular demonstration of its wisdom. It is now almost impossible to conceive what little consequence accrued to a third daughter, born between two prayed-for boys – the elder dead in infancy, the younger living – in a primogeniture-practising family in the middle of the last century. Yet this lowly person became the most famous woman in the world. We can only imagine how her brother felt.
That gymnastic overturning of childhood expectations lies at the bottom of many of the contradictions and paradoxical behaviours examined in Dianaworld, which analyses what that girl did become. Not just to herself, but to the various tribes and individuals who followed her progress, helped her, obsessed over her, tortured her, fantasised about her, used her, and in one way or another couldn’t leave her alone – a state of affairs she craved and feared in equal measure. Edward White’s categories are extensive. Her relationships with hairdressers, Americans, clothes designers, politicians, gays, newspapermen, staff, family members, superfans, lovers, prostitutes, children (hers and other people’s) are paraded here in an effort to unpeel the lacquer of mythology that accumulated on her persona and made her shine with such appalling brightness.
more here.
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