Author Wendy Holden of the book “The Princess” explains that the monarchy was interested in the now king marrying a “particular kind of girl.”
When bestselling author Wendy Holden first saw Lady Diana Spencer become royalty after saying “I do” to then-Prince Charles in 1981, she was mesmerized by the real-life fairy tale unfolding before her eyes. But, after researching the backstory of Princess Diana’s young adult life and relationship to Charles for her new novel, The Princess, Holden has actually discovered that their marriage and royal life wasn’t as dreamy as it appeared to the public. During an exclusive interview with People on August 17, 2023, the novelist unpacks all of her findings on Diana’s upbringing and experience in the royal family, namely her marriage.
Once Charles turned 30, Holden explains that the royal family was on the hunt for the right suitor to marry him. Instead of finding someone whom Charles actually loved, they needed a “particular kind of girl,” someone who checked all of the boxes. “She needed to be young,” the author tells the outlet. “She needed to be aristocratic, and she needed to be without a past. It was a very pragmatic decision. She was practically the only person who was left. He had had so many girlfriends by then.”
On the other hand, Diana—who escaped the aftermath of her parent’s difficult divorce by reading romance novels—thought her relationship to Charles was going to be a loving one. “She thought he was going to sweep her away and be a knight on a white charger—everything she always wanted,” Holden explains. Through her research, the author was shocked to learn that royal life for Diana was seemingly intense. “I hadn’t appreciated the extent to which what we saw the day before the wedding wasn’t just a little bit different from the reality but the actual complete reverse: How extreme it was, how dramatic it was, and how different it was,” she says. “That was a surprise to me.”
The Princess, which was published on July 6, 2023, is a story about Diana’s childhood, her young adult days sharing an apartment with her friends in London, and her unhappy marriage and experience as a royal, told through the eyes of a fictional friend. Her latest book is the third in a series of historical fiction novels about the lives of women in the royal family, including Queen Elizabeth II in The Governess and Wallis Simpson in The Duchess. To paint an accurate depiction of Diana in The Princess, Holden says she read countless biographies on the royal’s life, such as Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story, which used many of Diana’s own words.
During the interview, the outlet asked how Diana would have handled the tension between her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry—which heightened with the release of Harry and wife Meghan Markle’s docuseries, Harry & Meghan, and his tell-all memoir, Spare—if she were still alive today (Diana died in a car crash in 1997). “She had a good sense of humor, so maybe she’d have been able to dial down these entrenched positions,” Holden presumes. “She would have put family above all and relationships above all and tried not to have them not take up these extreme positions.”
Lilly Blomquist
