Charles Spencer's book Diana Swan Song etc etc . Thread the second.

[BasiliskStare]

There has been interest from some who engaged with the topic , so I'm starting a new thread as we are on page 10 . I honestly didn't think it would engender so much interest.

Let me be absolutely clear here. Threads meander , and sometimes go off topic and sometimes amusingly and interestingly so. My intention with this thread is to discuss the book , related matters eg contemporaneous accounts, reviews , interviews etc I'm also , frankly, interested to see how Piers Morgan's reaction to it goes.

As has been so often said anyone is allowed to post whatever they like on a public forum. I'm just explaining why I have started this thread. I have no intention of policing it .

Let's see how it goes 😎

Does anyone know if there is any information yet about how the book is selling?

I can't remember. I once saw her on something like The One Show, when she'd written a book and I did read her book about Princess Margaret.

I saw her on the Graham Norton show. It's definitely worth tracking down.

@gailforce1 - anecdoatal evidence , including newspapers etc, says that sales in actual bookshops are slow. However , as I understand it, sales numbers are released by Nielsen BookScan, in the UK, and Circana BookScan in the US. This is usually a week beyond publication date so probably next Tuesday. These , as I understand it include shop and online sales. So if this happens I reckon it will be the first indication of how well it is selling.

Pulping aside 😂

Edit spelling

Just to say re my post above my MN broke down whilst I was trying to edit the spelling - do forgive . Anyway my main point is I don't think any official sales figures will be available before next week.

@wordler Nearly all my DHs friend ls at university were married at 22 or 23. All met at university. No one was posh. It’s just what happened. DH didn’t stick with the woman he met but loads did. It’s certainly not an upper class trait. As my DDs went to boarding school, the upper classes just know each other. They don’t need to look at university! They are looking in a fairly small pond.

Sarah actually married better then Jane. I mean they both married well but it wasn't extradinary or anything. They married how they should. Basically sent to London to find husbands. Both Sarah and Ja e worked for vogue for instance. Jane was very bright. She had A Levels.

No the point I was making was that these women weren’t planning to use their degree, had absolutely no plan to get a job or have a career. They were looking for rich husbands so that they would never have to bother working.

My next door neighbour in the hall of residence was studying classics - I remember asking her what sort of career she was planning with a classics degree and she looked at me in astonishment and said she was simply there to find a husband - wasn’t I?

I was mainly responding to the discussion above about the aristocracy being out of touch re marriage for women - it wasn’t/isn’t just the aristocracy.

Look to each their own. The point of feminism is choice. I don't pretend to read minds but Kate's journey was essentially the same. I habe no idea if that was always the plan but she essentially did more modern version of what Diana and her sisters did. All yhe birth royal women did get educated and get jobs.

She has a YouTube channel.

@AuroraCake The point is, setting out to find a rich man so you never have to work isn't feminism.
I personally don't buy the "feminism is the choice to do whatever you like."

@FunPartyIdeas But we don’t all believe in the version of feminism you want. Your version is “do it all”. Work for money and work in the family home. Many of these women are looking after large homes and the business of running such a place. They are not necessarily using their degrees, but so what? I cannot see it matters as long as they are happy. Why should women be forced to make decisions based on what other women tell them to do?

Ruth Fermoy was an awful old baggage.

As an admittedly unreconstructed second wave feminist, I don't believe that feminism is about choice; it's about the liberation of women. Of course, those two concepts do intersect considerably.

As choices go, I do remember being pleased that Diana chose not to promise to "obey" in her marriage vows. As an American, I was surprised to learn that she was the first royal bride to make that choice and surprised still more that there seemed to be some controversy about that in the UK. I was married about the same time as Diana in the Episcopal Church (United States), with almost the same liturgy, except that "obey" wasn't even an option, having been removed from the Book of Common Prayer in 1928.

There wasn't a controversy, most women marrying in the C of E had made that decision by that time. I remember people saying "well, who on earth still says obey?!".
Interestingly, and more controversially, Sarah Ferguson kept in the word "obey"! That was commented on a lot.
Worked out well for her...

Absolutely!

Amazon update their bestsellers list every Wednesday, it went to the top of the non fiction bestsellers list as soon as it was released, but they don’t disclose sales numbers, will be interesting to see if it is still #1 this week.

Some people will want to be liberated to stay home and look after their children. Some will want to he president. The ability to have the life you choose is liberation. Divide and conquer is the way to keep people down. Men don't care whether you are a house husband or head.of Microsoft. They can hold the power line because they don't pick eachother apart. But apparently there is a right way yo be a woman.

Surely one of Diana’s sisters would have warned her about who she was marrying and what that entitled. Wasn’t it that she was drawn to becoming princess of Wales, as much as she was in love with Prince Charles?

The whole family knew. Diana knew the deal, but she wanted to be the Princess of Wales.

No she didn't know Charles would cheat from the very beginning and have no interest in her

I think it's obvious that for 100s of years daughters of the aristocracy were hoped to / cajoled into / forced to make advantageous marriages.

As were a lot of sons. Look at the wave of aristocrats marrying American heiresses because they had the money to rescue debt ridden ancestral estates.

She married a man she'd been out with a handful of times. If she thought it was going to be a fairytale, she was deluded.
Anyway, she chose the goose-gander route, and who could blame her?

But at 19 she was far from an adult capable of making adult decisions.

It seems like she was even a childish 19. Why didn’t her ‘blood family’ tell her to cop on. Her mother suffered an unhappy marriage, why didn’t she step in. Or did she and Diana ignored the warnings.

She was an adult. In 1981 we didn't infantilise adults the way we do now. Diana had been careful, she'd kept herself "tidy", as she says. Her family nickname was "Duch". She and the Spencers knew the deal. I'm not saying it was right and I'm not saying Charles had no blame, but I think that Diana wanted to be a princess. I don't buy the narrative of a clueless innocent child. She lived on the Sandringham Estate, she knew the royals, her Granny was pals with the QM. It was a deal.