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Product Description
As the editor of Majesty magazine, Ingrid Seward has developed professional and personal relationships with the royal family. We discover a surprising portrait of the English monarch and the princess, contradicting what the press has previously reported: a fragile Diana battling an unfeeling mother-in-law. We learn that the Queen tried to welcome Diana into the royal family and that Di failed to grasp the hand of friendship. From the princess herself we hear details of what went on between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. And we glimpse much more about the inner workings of the extended royal family. Entertaining and factual, The Queen & Di stands apart and above the countless, often inaccurate, accounts published to date about Diana. Ingrid Seward reveals for the first time the true relationship between two important women of the 20th century.
Amazon.com Review
Ingrid Seward, a prolific writer on the English royal family, was the last journalist to interview Princess Diana before her death in August 1997. In this intriguing book, Seward gives a worm's-eye view of Diana's trouble-plagued life, layered with episodes of betrayal and illness, and she accords full sympathy to the minor noblewoman who became "the people's princess." She is still more sympathetic to Diana's sometime nemesis Queen Elizabeth II, who, in Seward's account, labored endlessly to preserve the dignity of the monarchy in the face of a family that behaved in anything but a dignified manner.
Rising above the caricatures that color the popular press, Seward depicts a queen who tried her best to accommodate Diana--who was, it seems, never shy in voicing her displeasures and had an undeniable flair for recruiting the media in her cause, all the while protesting the press's intrusion into a fairy-tale life that "turned into a Gothic nightmare." Diana's insistence on airing her dirty laundry in public was bound to irritate the ever-sensitive queen, but more, Seward writes, "in her demands for love and sympathy, she gave self-fulfillment precedence over duty"--and for Elizabeth, dereliction of duty was the greatest possible sin one could commit. Their relationship could end only in tears; and so it did, taking much of the English public's good will toward the royal family with it. Sometimes racy and breathless, but intelligent all the same, Seward's account enlarges our understanding of the internal dynamics of the modern court while delivering no end of scandalous news, just as a palace chronicle should. --Gregory McNamee
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