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This is a story of the Buckingham Palace royal machine, which wanted to find a bride for Prince Charles, who was 30, and in the eyes of his family needed to get married. That's a great question, because that really puts us right in the middle of what's going on. Tell me about the heroine of your novel, this fun-loving, romantic, teenage girl named Diana Spencer. But, I want you to imagine for a moment that I am someone who has never heard of Princess Diana.
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The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Watch the "Salon Talks" episode on "The Princess" here or read below. And she also explained why the royal family was dead set on finding "a front-rank aristocrat" who also "had to be untouched and undefiled and pure and innocent," and how Diana's influence still remains so powerful decades after her untimely death. Holden talked to me about the real-life inspirations for the characters in her compulsively readable new book, including Charles' private "fixer" Stephen Barry. "She was young, very aristocratic, but completely in love with love," Holden said on "Salon Talks," "completely idealistic, completely romantic." Drawing on a wealth of intimate royal memoirs and biographies, Holden discovered that "How she actually got to be the Princess of Wales is quite unknown." So she set out to reveal the magnetic yet sheltered young woman who later reportedly felt "like a lamb to the slaughter" when she entered her artfully arranged marriage. It's a complex and warmly human view of one of the most influential women of the modern era, an intimate fictionalized glimpse into the person Holden calls "the ultimate royal disruptor." In "The Princess," British bestselling novelist Wendy Holden imagines a fun-loving adolescent from a troubled home, blindsided by an infatuation with the seemingly perfect man. How could the girl - how could anyone - have imagined how it would turn out? But behind the scenes, the girl was in many ways a game piece, moved around by royal insiders to keep the machinery of the monarchy running smoothly. In the hindsight of history, it's easy to see why young Lady Diana Spencer's story seemed at first such a fairy tale.
#Young charles and diana free
A beautiful, rebellious teenage girl dreams of breaking free from her unhappy family and being swept off her feet by a worldly prince.
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