Diana: Triumph and Tragedy—Her Own Story

Timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the tragic death of Princess Diana comes a brilliant new biography from American historian Jane Tippett that uses Diana’s own words and the intimate recollection of those close to her to reveal the woman behind the myth.

The shy teenager who married a prince. The betrayed wife trapped in an unhappy marriage. The glamorous rebel who challenged the House of Windsor. The compassionate princess who captured the world’s heart. Thirty years after her death, these familiar versions of Diana have hardened into legend. But they tell only part of her story.

Drawing on a remarkable range of testimony and contemporary evidence, this major new biography traces Diana’s transformation from an insecure young aristocrat into the most famous woman in the world. Vulnerable yet formidable, Diana was neither simply the victim of an unfeeling institution nor the calculating media manipulator portrayed by her critics.

What emerges instead is the story of a monarchy confronted by a new kind of public figure – and of a woman who learned to harness her extraordinary fame to redefine royal ideas of duty, emotion, motherhood, and public service.

Authoritative, psychologically acute, and compellingly told, Diana reclaims Diana from the mythology that surrounds her, revealing how the fairy-tale princess so familiar to millions became a woman who forever changed the world that survived her.