What to Know
Romance novels are having a major moment right now thanks to BookTok and the resurgence of reading as a popular hobby, and Princess Diana would have been all about it. According to a new book about the women of the royal family, Diana was actually super into “pulp romance,” which might have fueled the fairytale dreams that led her to find her happily ever after with then-Prince Charles — or that led her to try to find that happy ending, anyway.
Princess Diana was introduced to romance novels at a young age.
In an excerpt from royal expert Catherine Mayer’s new book, Divide and Rule: Royal Women and Their Battles, that was published by People this week, she wrote that Diana was first supplied with romance novels after her father married Raine Legge, the daughter of novelist Barbara Cartland. At the time, Diana was in her early teenage years and she absolutely “devoured” the books “by the truckload.”
According to one of Diana’s school friends who knew her at the time, “She literally had a whole drawer filled with these things.”
This meant that Diana dreamed of finding a “modern-day version of courtly love,” and who better to fill that desire than a real life prince?
Charles may not have been the first object of her royal affection, though.
Catherine claimed in her book that before Diana set her sights on Charles, it was the now disgraced, former prince Andrew who she had a crush on — could you imagine how different the monarchy would be if he was the royal she had married?
“Before she ever met her future husband, she developed a passion at a distance for one of his brothers,” Catherine wrote. “The schoolfriend says that every year until Diana turned fifteen or sixteen, she sent Andrew a valentine card, anonymously of course.”
Her love of romantic fiction may have given her unrealistic expectations of what marriage to a future king would be like.
Obviously, her crush on Andrew never worked out, and Diana ended up married to Charles instead. And apparently, he did fit her romance novel dreams, but in the most toxic way possible.
“Charles fitted the Cartland mould in one respect: his emotional unavailability,” Catherine wrote. “The reticence of Cartland’s heroes belies agonies of loneliness. Wounded by past trauma and hemmed in by convention, they hide the emotions — but never fear! A good woman can unlock their hearts. It is a meme that repeats throughout every one of Cartland’s 723 books and across the wider romance genre, including variations of the Cinderella story.”
As we know now, their particular romance didn’t have a happy ending, and there’s a good chance their marriage was never really happy for either of them the entire time they were together.
But it does make sense that Diana would be super into the idea of marrying royalty if she grew up with an obsession with books like these. She would have really loved the Bridgerton series.
READ NEXT: The Eerie Parallels Between Princess Diana & Carolyn Bessette That Experts Say Most People Miss
