Tips on Researching a Book Inspired by Lesser-Known Moments in History
In writing a novel about Princess Diana, I was hardly picking an obscure subject. On the contrary; Diana is one of the most famous women who ever lived. My interest in her, however, wasn’t in the episodes of her life that we all know all about, which basically happened after her marriage. I wanted to write a novel which stopped at the moment she stepped definitively onto the world stage, which was the moment she stepped out of the carriage at S Paul’s. For me, that was THE END, which in many ways it actually was anyway.
My novel The Princess was to be about how she had got there; Diana’s journey to the altar. I have always been interested in routes to fame; the portals through which people pass from obscurity to celebrity. I explored this in the novel which preceded The Princess, which was The Duchess, about Wallis Simpson. What I wondered about Wallis was how could a woman in her 30s, not beautiful, poor, foreign and lacking any social connections, as well as being a divorcee married to a struggling businessman, capture the heart of the world’s most glamorous and eligible bachelor?
Having puzzled over it endlessly, I developed the theory that Edward VIII never wanted to be king at all, and that Wallis was a means of escape. She was the perfect woman for him because she was so perfectly wrong. I actually think he used her, and that she was the victim of his scheming, not the other way round, as is popularly believed.
One way I arrived at this theory was via a lesser-known moment in history, which actually occurs in The Royal Governess, my first novel in the ‘Windsor Women Trilogy.’ The Royal Governess is the amazing story of Marion Crawford, the young Scots teacher who had such an effect on the late Queen Elizabeth. In the scene I am referring to, Marion is walking in the hills above Balmoral, the royal family’s Scottish holiday castle. She comes across a mysterious American woman in the woods who is letting off a considerable amount of frustration. This is Wallis, who has arrived in Scotland in strange circumstances.
Summoned up from London by her lover the King, Wallis has endured a day-long train journey only to arrive in a blaze of unwelcome publicity. Edward has come to meet her at the station instead of opening a new hospital as he was supposed to be doing. This has resulted in acres of unfavourable newspaper coverage in which Wallis is cast as the wicked witch who has tempted the sovereign away from all that is good and right.
Having thought about this, I decided it was very unlikely Wallis knew in advance about Edward and the hospital. She surely would never have agreed to come and take all the blame for his flakiness and would equally surely have encouraged him to do his duty. It made me wonder what else she didn’t know about, and from this relatively small incident I was able to build a convincing theory—I certainly convinced myself—that Edward kept a great deal from her. Especially his ultimate motive in wanting to marry her. So, you see, small incidents can lead to big things; in that case a whole book!
In The Princess, as I’ve explained, I’m exploring Diana’s backstory. I knew it would be interesting, but I little knew quite how interesting. It’s a story that combines glamour and grandeur with pathos and comedy. And the best thing of all is that it’s not at all well-known. And I am certainly the first author to fictionalize it; The Princess is the first Diana novel. One of the apparently minor but hugely significant aspects, I thought, is Diana’s obsession with romantic novels. Her Barbara Cartland fixation is often sneered at and Diana herself along with it, but I think this is wrong and misses something important.
It was after her parents’ toxic and terrible divorce that Diana sought escape in paperback romances. They offered her an alternative universe where Love triumphed, where handsome princes rescued beautiful princesses and everyone lived happily ever after. The titles of these novels may be ridiculous and the plots frankly preposterous. But that’s not the point. What matters in Diana’s case, and which is a central theme of The Princess, is that these novels represented an alternative reality full of head-spinning, heart-surging romance in which this damaged girl fervently wished to believe.
And Diana did believe in it. She believed in it so strongly that it eventually came to form her world view. And so, when she met him, she believed Charles was a hero straight out of one of these stories. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, she thought he loved only her and they would be happy ever after.
But as The Princess shows, the actual Diana-Charles engagement was heavily manipulated by people with a vested interest. It’s a horrible irony—and by no means the only one—that in the midst of all this cold and cynical scheming was a warm-hearted, dreamy teenager who believed in storybook romance.
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And the Barbara Cartland aspect doesn’t stop there, either. One of the reasons why the very young and innocent Diana was considered so perfect for the much older, more experienced Charles was that she was ‘without a past,’ as the euphemism goes. The Prince of Wales had to marry not just an aristocrat, but a virgin, which seems ridiculously mediaeval given that this was the late 1970s. Nonetheless, it was the case, and given that it was the late 1970s, aristocratic virgins were in relatively short supply. Diana was just about the only one and given that she was living in central London with lots of dashing male friends, her chastity seemed odd to many people at the time.
But it makes perfect sense if you know your Barbara Cartlands. In the world of her novels, Love is the reward of Chastity. Romantic heroines are always pure, which is how they get the man of their dreams and everlasting happiness. So Diana’s romantic novel fixation, seen by many as so trivial, was actually fundamental. It made it possible for her to ignore all the obvious problems with Charles and resist the usual temptations. It created a unique set of circumstances that enabled the royal wedding of 1981 to happen, and, in another ironic twist, to actually look like something from a romantic novel as it did so.
So you see, apparently minor details can really matter, even with hugely famous figures. In my experience they are the most significant ones of all because they can throw important light on a subject and enable you to construct a different and original take. So my advice is to pick your historical subject and read very carefully round them. Note anything that strikes you as slightly odd, or doesn’t quite fit the picture. That might well be your starting point for something great.
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