Everyone had their own opinion which is fine. But I think this interpretation ^ is unnecessarily harsh.
To describe her as embittered is not really accurate. People forget that without sm, most people did not know about Charles’s affair with Camilla. There were rumours but everyone assumed it was the press inventing stories. So when Diana decided to put her version of events out there, it was a shock because the real truth was much worse than just a failing marriage. She really had been used very poorly by the palace machine who did indeed want her “to go quietly”.
In the end they say Charles and she reconciled and were able to have a civil conversation. And she grew in confidence doing solo charity work and really blossomed.
She was academically dim; she said of herself she was as thick as two short planks. But Patrick Jephson who worked with her for eight years said she was very canny and intuitively smart. Also that you couldn’t sustain that job in public if you were as unstable and loopy as she had been described. He called her very down to earth with a good sense of humour.
She was indeed very privileged in terms of wealth and status. I don’t know how true this is but many people said in aristocratic circles, her family was seen as older with a longer lineage than our current royal family.
But she had a very dysfunctional upbringing - her mother was basically forced to leave the family home when Diana was six - so to criticise her for not using the “common sense she was born with” seems rather unfair.
She did manipulate the press but given that many vile and untrue stories about her appeared in the papers every day, she would be mad not to try and influence the narrative. It is what any PR company would do nowadays managing someone with her level of fame.
The border line psychiatric line comment is frankly distasteful and in part came about from what Patrick Jephson’s described as a “sustained campaign” to discredit her, which happened when Charles brought in heavyweight PR professionals to rebuild his own reputation and that of Camilla. It worked. A close friend of the Queen called her “damaged goods” in public and a government minister called her “a loose cannon”. It is what powerful establishment men have been doing to their wives for centuries. And btw, it is still going on today.
She did have an eating disorder which she recovered from, and she was extremely unhappy at times during her marriage, but that was the result of discovering that her husband was in love with another woman, before, and after, and probably during their marriage and throughout her pregnancies. And she was supposed to “put up and shut up.” That would probably be enough to destabilise most women for a while.
She did become paranoid at times but that was largely down to Martin Bashir and his 72 forged documents.
What was she doing with a wastrel playboy when she died?
One theory was that she was trying to make the man (Hasnat Khan) she was in love with at the time, jealous, as he had broken off their relationship realising that he couldn’t reconcile her level of fame with his career as a heart surgeon.
Two she was mixing with a family and a man who could afford her protection from the massive level of media intrusion that she encountered wherever she went. Given what happened, this wasn’t a smart move, but it had been reported earlier in the summer that she had found it extremely difficult to find anywhere she could take William and Harry on holiday where they were safe, so a yacht owned by a very wealthy family seemed the obvious solution.
As for her so called canonisation that was largely an invention of the press. She had massive flaws. She had affairs with married men. Most people could see she that despite her privilege, she lived a pretty unhappy life. People were aware that, despite being chased by hordes of paps wherever she went, she was pretty isolated in her private life. And put it this way, I think many people with broken relationships could identify with her struggles.