We Love Diana Because She Took on the Royals and Won
Diana Spencer—aka Princess Diana, Lady Di, Dutch—lived barely a year as a divorced woman. Her divorce from Prince Charles was finalized on August 28, 1996; she’d die in the infamous car crash in Paris a mere 368 days later on August 31, 1997.
But she had, in fact, been separated from Charles since December 1992, living in a murky marital purgatory nearly four years before their divorce—a limbo, given her status as “royal but not royal,” that arguably continued even those last 368 days between divorce and death. She was a thirty-something single mom of two boys figuring out how to date… in a fishbowl. That was (speaking metaphorically) a minefield and took, I’m confident, more courage than her walks into actual minefields.
There are a variety of reasons why many of us remain obsessed with her and her progeny. The movies, the books, the documentaries, the musicals, the plays, and the TV series are an indication of the depth and breadth of our addiction.