Spotlight & Giveaway: The Princess by Wendy Holden

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Wendy Holden to HJ!

Hi Wendy and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, The Princess!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

It’s about the unknown early years of Princess Diana. I wanted to explore the forces that made her the person she was. It’s an incredible story which mixes up epically dysfunctional families, 80s posh London flat-sharing and a romantic novel fixation with world-changing consequences. I don’t think many people realise the way Diana became Princess of Wales. It was like a horse race with lots of hurdles to jump. The hurdles were social tests like polo matches, sailing, fishing and, if you got that far, weekends at Balmoral with the Queen. But in fact, by the time Diana was doing all this, she was the only horse left in the race. It’s sad, glamorous, funny and strange, sometimes all at the same time. And I am definitely the first novelist to write about it! 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

There’s a scene on board the Royal Yacht Britannia when Diana is with Princess Margaret. They are looking at a silver table ornament hung with yellow rubies. Diana says she didn’t realise rubies could be yellow and Margaret says yes, and isn’t it a good thing. One gets so very tired of the red sort. I have to say I made that up, although I can completely imagine PM saying it in real life! It was great fun, writing all these royal characters.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

Some of my favourite bits to write were the cheerful but short-lived flat-sharing days in London. Diana was so happy in her smart Kensington apartment with her girlfriends. They swapped clothes, cooked spaghetti suppers and had a goldfish called Battersea. She was a TV addict and used to watch soaps with a bowl of Harvest Crunch cereal on her knee.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

One of the main points of this novel is that Charles never was attracted to Diana, any more than a tiny bit. He had other fish to fry in that respect, as the world now knows. His and Diana’s whole relationship was heavily manipulated from the start by other people – relatives from both sides mainly – with vested interests. Charles needed to marry for the future of the Crown, and a young, aristocratic girl with no ‘past’, as it was euphemistically put, had to be found. Diana was just about the only suitable candidate. She was mad about Charles, but had an unrealistic view of him. Fuelled by the romantic novels from which she sought escape from her unhappy upbringing, she thought he was a knight in shining armour, a prince straight out of a fairy tale. The combination of those two points of view was disastrous. On the other hand, it makes brilliant material for a novel!

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

Any scene with the Queen Mother in. She was so waspish and funny. It was her that first talent-spotted Diana and realised she was a suitable bride for Charles. The occasion on which this happened – Diana’s sister’s wedding – was great fun to write.

Readers should read this book….

Anyone interested in Princess Diana should read it – and that’s all of us, surely! She was the most famous woman in the world. And yet most people know relatively little about her background. No novelist has ever explored it before, so THE PRINCESS is completely original. She was a young, romantic girl who was terribly damaged, probably the last person on earth that Prince Charles should have married. The royal wedding of 1981 was the exact opposite of the fairytale it seemed. My novel explains why this was. There’s a lot about the British class system here, and upper-class life in general. But Diana’s human situation is what interested me. I was moved, fascinated, angered and amused in turn. What happened to her – and by extension, Great Britain – was almost beyond belief.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’ve got a number of projects in the pipeline, none sufficiently advanced enough to talk about. Diana has filled my head for years and it’s hard to let go of her.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: 1 physical book, The Princess by Wendy Holden. 

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: How has reading The Princess changed your view of Princess Diana?

 
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Excerpt from The Princess:

As at all my other schools, girls without family to take them out spent Sunday afternoons in the dining hall. Amid the scent of boiled cabbage from the just‑finished lunch, we sat at the long tables and made desultory conversation as we waited for our more fortunate peers to come back.
I had learned to take a book with me, usually a story about someone so miserable, they made me feel positively fortunate. Jane Eyre had kept me going for a while. Now I was hunched over The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. I had just got to the part where orphaned Bonnie is forced to exist on two raw onions when I heard a light voice say hello.
I looked up in surprise. Standing before me, blond hair backlit by the sun streaming through the dining room windows, was the tall figure of my dormitory savior.
Since the Celia incident, I had seen little of Diana. As expected, she had been taken up by the school elite: the beautiful and the grand. She also seemed to be in the lower forms for most subjects, while I was in the top ones. What view of her I had was from a

distance, and she was always in the middle of a group of laughing girls. That someone like her had intervened to help someone like me seemed increasingly like something I had imagined.
I thought she must have come to the dining hall to fetch some‑ thing. But she sat down on the bench next to me, her back against the table, and started swinging her long legs.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. I did not mean to sound blunt, but awkwardness made me shy.
“Same as you.”
“This is for people whose parents can’t come.”
She swung her legs out again. “Well that’s me. My parents can’t come.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re divorced.” “What does that mean?”
“It means that my mother doesn’t live with my father.” “Why not?”
“Oh,” she said dismissively. “It’s not very interesting. Where are your parents, anyway?”
I hesitated. I hated explaining that I was an orphan. People were always either embarrassed for themselves or sorry for me. I found both excruciating. I took a deep breath. “Actually, I don’t have parents.”
The blue eyes widened. “Not at all? Not a single one?” I shook my head.
“Oh, so you’re an orphan?” Her tone was interested, rather than awkward.
I nodded.
“What happened?”
Her directness surprised me. Most people shied away from asking. “They died in a car crash. But I don’t remember. I was only a baby.”

Her blue eyes remained on me, curious, thoughtful. “What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?” “Being an orphan.”
I shrugged. “It’s what I’m used to.”
“But can you remember them? Your father’s tall figure in the doorway, the scented rustle of your mother’s dress as she bent to kiss you good night?”
I stared at her in surprise. Scented rustle? Tall figure in the doorway? Where on earth had she got that from? “Er, no.”
“Don’t you miss them horribly?”
I hadn’t been asked this before, not even by Aunt Mary. Especially not by Aunt Mary; feelings were never discussed at home. It was hard to know how to answer. “You just try not to think about it and get on with things,” I replied eventually.
She nodded but said nothing. I worried I had sounded cold and uncaring. “I never really knew them,” I elaborated. “So it’s hard to miss them, really.”
She was looking at me very intently. “But how do you really feel about it?” she asked. “Inside, I mean?”
“I don’t really feel anything,” I was about to insist, when something swept through me that might have knocked me off my feet if I had not been sitting down.
It was like a hurtling black ball that burst into my heart, followed by the most aching sense of loss that I had ever known. Overwhelmed, I hung my head and felt the painful sting of tears. At some distant level I realized that I was crying in front of this girl again. But as before, there was nothing I could do about it.
Something pressed the far side of my arm. She was hugging me. I slumped into her, fighting for control. My nose was running. She passed me a tissue, which I took gratefully. “Sorry.” I sniffed, awkwardly detaching myself.

“It’s all right,” she said, letting go easily, as if it were nothing to be embarrassed about at all.
After that, we sat in companionable silence and read. She, too, had brought a book, a somewhat tatty paperback called The Queen of Hearts by an author I had never heard of, Barbara Cartland. The cover was a sort of bad painting in which a blond girl in a white dress looked adoringly up at a dashing man in uniform.
She seemed gripped by it, turning over the pages with a breath‑ less anticipation. But I found it hard to return to Bonnie and her raw onions. I felt different after our conversation: lighter, as if a burden had been laid down.
Eventually, the sound of car doors slamming and cheerful fare‑ wells from outside the windows announced that the others were back from their fun family afternoons.
After that, Diana returned to her usual group. Perhaps their families took her out with them. At any rate, she was not in the dining hall the following Sunday, or the one after that.
I was disappointed, but not surprised. Expecting us to become friends would, I knew, have been unrealistic. Nonetheless, I felt grateful to her. She had released me from the effort of pretending not to mind. Being allowed to feel sad, to miss the parents I had never known, was a liberation.

erm progressed. I worked hard, as I was supposed to, and did well, as I was supposed to. Diana, meanwhile, seemed to plow
a rather less steady course. She developed a reputation for daring, for never turning down a challenge. On one occasion I watched as, egged on by the others, she ate eight slices of bread and butter and two kippers at a sitting, a new record for gluttony.
As stories circulated of her climbing high trees and running down the drive at midnight, I grew concerned for her.

Encouraged by the ever‑admiring crowd, she seemed to be taking more and more risks. I watched, worried, from the back of a gaggle of girls on the edge of the school’s outdoor swimming pool as Diana, arms outstretched, soared high into the air from the topmost board. My heart was in my mouth, and for some time after that, whenever I closed my eyes, I saw her long body in its black school swimming costume against the boundless blue of the sky, plunging down like a bullet and slicing into the water like a knife.
Then rumors began about her dancing in the dining hall at night, against school rules. When, finally, they filtered down to our end of the dormitory, I looked at Catherine in dismay. “She’ll get into trouble,” I said.
Catherine gave me a wise look. “Well, she wouldn’t be the first Spencer to do that. Her sister got expelled, you know.”
Sheer horror flashed through me. I didn’t enjoy school much, but being expelled from it was the worst thing I could imagine. As well as the shame and disgrace, it would mean the derailment of all my future hopes. I had never heard of it actually happening though; Miss Rudge, the headmistress, did not seem like the expel‑ ling type. “What for?” I asked.
Catherine was clearly enjoying my obvious amazement. “Drinking.”
“Drinking what?” It didn’t seem like a crime to me. “Alcohol, of course. Vodka.”
I felt naive and unsophisticated. I hardly knew what vodka was, let alone why a schoolgirl would drink it.
“Lights out!” yelled the dormitory monitor, a bossy girl called Rose at the other end.
Darkness flooded the room, and we huddled under our blankets. I could not settle, however. I was agitated, and my mind tumbled with questions. I edged myself toward Catherine. “Why did she drink vodka?”

Catherine was almost asleep and came back to consciousness with a snort. “What?”
I repeated my question in a whisper.
“It doesn’t make your breath smell, so no one’s able to tell,” hissed back Catherine.
But someone had obviously been able to tell in the end. “I don’t mean that,” I whispered. “I mean, why drink it at all?”
“Who knows? Those old aristocratic families do crazy things.
For the fun of it, I suppose.”
It sounded like a waste to me, and the idea that Diana, who had helped me, would end up sharing her sister’s fate was an awful one. I decided to keep an eye on her.
From my bed at the end of the dormitory, it was difficult to monitor the rest of the long room, but I would do my best. I dozed, half‑awake, straining my ears for any noise that might be someone creeping out.
Once the initial whispering and giggling had died down, there was nothing for some hours. It seemed that the Diana dancing rumors were unsubstantiated talk after all. I must have dozed off, because something suddenly woke me up.
I sat up in bed. All was silent. The moonlight blooming behind the thin curtains showed a row of prone and slumbering girls. And then, at the far end by the door, a movement. Someone was slipping out.
I lifted my covers and climbed reluctantly from beneath them. It was only October, but the nights were already cold. The chill air seized me as I groped for my dressing gown. I fumbled for my slippers and hurried down the lino floor between the beds. Reaching Diana’s, I saw with dismay that it was empty.
Once outside the dormitory, I felt my heart begin to thump. I realized that my actions potentially also had consequences for me. Roaming about the school at night was strictly forbidden. If I was

caught, there would be trouble. Quite how much, I didn’t want to dwell on.
As I sped through the gallery toward the staircase, I glanced at the portraits hanging on the paneled walls. Their stern gaze seemed to warn me to turn back before it was too late. I carried on, how‑ ever, down the slippery polished stairs. Above me hung the huge and heavy brass chandelier, which, as always, I imagined pulling away and plunging to the ground with a mighty crash.
The passage at the bottom was dark and deserted. I had never been around the school at night; it was entirely different from the daytime, when it was full of the chatter and clatter of girls. It seemed more like the private house it once had been. I started to wonder who had lived here and whether their spirits now walked the corridors.
So terrifying was this thought that I almost scurried back up the stairs. Then I paused. Above the boom of my heart, my ear had caught something, a faint snatch of music. It was coming from the direction of the dining room.
I hurried along the passage, in which, as always, the smell of cabbage lingered. The music got louder as I reached the double doors. I recognized it now, some swelling Tchaikovsky from The Nutcracker.
I opened the door a crack and peered in. Slabs of moonlight fell through the windows onto long tables set for morning breakfast with rows of white plates. An orange sat on each, all glowing eerily like lamps, and dancing between them, white flannel school night‑ dress billowing, was Diana.
Her eyes were wide open, but I could see that she was some‑ where very far away. Propelled by the music, she sped over the parquet in her bare feet. I had no idea where she had got the record player from; some nearby office, perhaps. I felt awed at her daring,

but far more at her dancing. I had never known she was as good as this.
It was transporting to watch as she first spun, then lengthened out into a graceful arabesque. Where she had learned this sequence of rippling steps that seemed to grow naturally out of her feet, one leading to the other, I could not imagine. In Madame Vacani’s lessons, we rarely got beyond the basic positions.
Her movements made a romantic dream world of the mundane dining room with its cabbage smells. There was a mysterious radiance about her, a quiet strength and an absolute authority, as if she knew exactly what she was doing and why.
Then something pulled me back from the dreamworld and into the here and now. A sound, coming from behind. Footsteps in the passage, firm and adult, approaching rapidly. Someone was coming.

Excerpted from THE PRINCESS by Wendy Holden, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Britain, 1961: A beautiful blonde baby is born to Viscount Althorp, heir to the Spencer earldom. But Diana grows up amid the fallout of her parents’ messy divorce. She struggles at school. Her refuge throughout is romantic novels. She dreams of falling in love and being rescued by a handsome prince.

In royal circles, there is concern about the Prince of Wales. Charles is nearing thirty and the right girl needs to be found, fast. She must be young, aristocratic and completely free of past liaisons. Pure and innocent. Eighteen-year-old Diana Spencer is just about the only candidate. Her yearning to be loved dovetails with royal desperation for a bride. But the route to the altar is perilous. There are hidden dangers and ruthless schemers. Diana’s dream of love will change a nation.
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Meet the Author:

Wendy Holden is a British novelist. She’s authored ten Sunday Times top ten bestsellers and has sold over three million copies worldwide.
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