Exploring ‘Dianaworld’: Princess Diana’s obsessive new biography

Princess Diana remains one of the most intriguing royals to serve as the subject for an endless stream of written accounts and Edward White’s latest work, Dianaworld: An Obsession, poses further evidence to the fact.

Described by Google Books as “A fascinating new perspective on the life and afterlife of Diana, Princess of Wales”, the biography offers “both a portrait of the princess, and group portraits of those who knew her intimately”.

While the author navigates his text’s subject with unconventional means like “interviews with sex workers and professional lookalikes, to the Mass Observation social research project and the Great Diary Project in Britain, and the peculiar work of outsider artists.”

A cultural obsession

White, who has also authored biographies about other famous subjects like Alfred Hitchcockt, described his book as “less a biography of Diana, more the story of a cultural obsession”. Despite the extreme choice of words, The Guardian reported that the greatest strength of the author’s writing is “his desire to take seriously the stories that drew people to Diana and continue to shape her afterlives.”

The discoveries

The book’s unique perspectives provide heartfelt and revelatory insights into, as the title suggests, Diana’s world. Where some of the people interviewed by White connected to the late royal’s narrative of the “doomed family”, the biography’s writer also charted her actual connection with the acclaimed actress Glenn Close, to whom she was distantly related.

The book further notes that Diana’s choice of philanthropic causes and associations reflected “how she felt about herself: abandoned, rejected, and misunderstood”. 

White wrote that Princess Diana “compensated for” the lack of passion and loyalty in her marriage to Charles, then the Prince of Wales, “by carving out a public existence that focused on service to the suffering”. A recurring theme in the book, highlighted by multiple such observations included throughout Edward White’s biographical account.