Born in an age of deference, the Princess was to die in an age of egalitarianism. Attempting to straddle the two, wanting to be treated as both equal and superior, and vacillating, from one moment to the next, between the easy-going and the hoity-toity, her behaviour often led to tears before bedtime.
I’m not going to spend much time on Craig Brown’s ‘biography’ of Princess Margaret, Ma’am Darling and there’s a good reason…
The book is comprised of 99 vignettes about Margaret, spanning her whole life. And it seems that loads of people were willing to share a incident story –
…if you were in search of an amusing tale with which to entertain your friends, you’d opt for the immersive Margaret experience: a late night and a show of stroppiness, all ready to jot down in your diary the moment she left, her high-handedness transformed, as if by magic, into anecdote.
The Queen makes an occasional appearance, as does the Queen Mother, but the focus is firmly on Margaret’s antics with her chosen social set; her frequently rude behaviour at dinner parties; her doomed relationship with Peter Townsend; and her disastrous marriage to Anthony Armstrong-Jones.
She leaned towards the artistic, the camp and the modish, even going so far as to marry a man at the centre of that particular Venn diagram.
But here’s the thing. Early in the book (‘glimpse 19’) there’s a fictitious chapter about the Princess marrying Pablo Picasso. Picasso’s obsession with the Princess is documented, however this extrapolation by Brown derails the book. The ‘flourish’ is repeated a number of times, in different ways, as the book progresses. How do you then discern the real from the fake? And did I care? No. But what a strange editorial decision.
2/5
Princess Margaret was born in 1930, the same year as air hostess and newscaster entered the language, and died in 2002, when googling, selfie, blogger and weapons of mass destruction first appeared. Is it just me, or do a remarkably high proportion of the words that share her birthday also reflect something of her character? … Inventions that first came on the market in 1930, thus introducing new words to the language, included bulldozer, electric blanket and jingle, all of which have a faint echo of Margaret about them. The Gibson…was introduced to fashionable society.
As part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Belfast summer and Melburnian winter. The results for the day I finished this book (August 12): Belfast 16°-20° and Melbourne 6°-20°.