I only have two frames of reference when it comes to Diana. The first was in 1982 when Diana married Charles and at infant school we were given a blue leather bookmark to commemorate the upcoming royal marriage. I can still feel the slick synthetic grain of it, the sort of small token that infantilised monarchy for the very young and slotted it neatly into the British ritual of low-cost pageantry. The second comes much later. I was working a night shift at London Victoria station, listening to a mix on Radio 1 or Kiss. I can’t now remember which. The news broke of the accident and death of Diana. That was it for that mix—lost, never to be remembered. After my shift, I walked from Victoria to Green Park to get the first tube, taking me past Buckingham Palace. The spectacle was already in full swing. Camera rigs were up, reporters doing solemn pieces to camera. I stayed and watched for a bit, and so did the clubbers, gathering just in front of the cameras, their pupils wide, dishevelled appearance unmistakable, arms round each other’s shoulders. One of the reporters said it was nice to see so many young people coming to pay their respects, Diana being well loved by the young. Little did she know most were off their bonces on pills and speed, this being a mere distraction before the next club opened. Such was the People’s Princess: mourned by the people, though not always for the reasons the state and media liked to suggest.
Edward White’s Dianaworld attempts to map this paradox. It is not a biography in the usual sense but a cultural excavation, a “story of a cultural obsession told via an exploration of ‘Dianaworld,’ the sprawling, ever-evolving precinct of her various lives—public and private, real and imagined.” If Diana appears at first as a fixed historical subject. Her wedding, her death, her smile. What White shows is that she was instead a surface onto which contradictory fantasies were endlessly projected.
He describes Diana as a “cut-and-shut” cultural figure, a term from car repair: “welding together different parts of two cars to make a single new vehicle.” At a distance, the illusion holds. It is only up close that the joins begin to show. Diana as aristocrat and commoner, saint and saboteur, icon and victim. She was “the locus of very different, perhaps antithetical, identities: ancient and modern, royalist and republican, nationalist and internationalist.” These contradictions are not problems to be resolved, White argues, but clues to her cultural function. Diana was not coherent. She was useful.
The first chapter, “Blood Family,” is less origin story than genealogical performance. Diana’s childhood is presented as raw material for later myth-making. Her parents’ bitter divorce, her father’s emotional absence, her feelings of rejection—“I was my father’s favourite… but they looked on me as an inconvenience”—all become part of the image. Not just tragic, but representative. “Her telling of the rupture in her parents’ marriage… established her as an emblem of an increasingly common rite of passage,” one that allowed her to resonate across Britain’s class spectrum, as the most glamorous child of a broken home.
But White is clear: this was never just a story of trauma. It was also about status, projection, spectacle. The Spencer name gave Diana “a chance to trill up and down the social scale in a way that wasn’t available to her parents’ generation.” The aristocracy, long ridiculed in postwar culture for its eccentricities and excesses, found in Diana a vessel for redemption. A “true aristocrat” who “instantly made people at ease,” she had what her friend Rosa Monckton called “the manners of a true aristocrat,” even as she cultivated a working-class affect. She was, as White repeatedly stresses, the person through whom “the cultural worlds of Britain’s various class communities drifted close enough together.”
It’s no accident that Roy Strong, no stranger to self-fashioning, was horrified by Diana’s accent—“a bit common, as though it were the fashion to learn to talk down.” In fact, it was. For a new generation of aristocrats, passing as ‘of the people’ was the new currency. As White notes, “A much easier task was to use language to go the other way, the kind of verbal slumming that Diana and many of her aristocratic peers took up once the cultural transformations of the 1960s had begun.” The point is not that Diana was ever authentically working-class. It’s that she knew how to perform ordinariness in a way that resonated, especially through affect: “She cried, she blushed, she swore. . . . She kissed people. Suddenly it was no longer COOL to be cool.”
White’s readings of media spectacle are especially sharp. His chapter on the “Rat Pack” of royal correspondents captures the slow-motion trainwreck of the Charles and Diana marriage as both soap opera and hunting ground. Reporters tracked Diana like quarry, admiring the way she could “watch us watching her” with a mirror in her compact. “You had to be a real professional,” one hack recalls, to think of that. She played them as much as they played her. But the contract was always uneven. “His greatest Diana scoops were based on him silently looking at her from a distance,” White writes of James Whitaker. “Six hours in which nothing happened, other than him not letting her out of his sight.”
More disturbing is White’s exploration of race and nation. Diana’s bloodline is fetishised not only for its aristocratic pedigree but for its Englishness. “A sprig of a family tree that had roots spreading deep into the history of England,” as one biography had it. White notes how Diana’s “unadulterated Britishness” was cast as a contrast to the Windsors’ German and Greek lineage. Julie Burchill, in a moment of ethno-nationalist fantasy, called her “a beautiful Anglo-Saxon virgin captured and forcibly wed to a swarthy Graeco-German.” Diana, in this logic, becomes the soul of England reclaiming its throne from foreign usurpers. Even her children were reframed: “In her son William… the country will have a ‘new King Arthur for the new millennium.’”
White doesn’t fully confront the reactionary edge of this mythos, but it lingers beneath the surface. His primary interest is in Diana as an object of cultural projection. This is where Dianaworld works best: in its account of ordinary people. Clubbers, drag queens, diarists, cleaners. Who saw in Diana something of themselves. One man writes in his diary that if he won the lottery, he would found a “Society of Deprived Children for anyone over the age of eighteen.” Diana’s appeal, in these pages, is not simply personal. It is therapeutic. She allows people to weep for themselves in public, to process the dislocations of Thatcherism, privatisation, and emotional austerity.
White never quite theorises this fully, and there are moments when the book risks mistaking cultural obsession for political substance. To say that Diana “allowed us to examine so many aspects of life in modern Britain” is not the same as saying she changed them. Her radicalism was always symbolic. Her empathy mediated through charity, her rebellion safely contained within the idioms of royal melodrama. What Diana offered was the feeling of transformation, not its reality.
Still, Dianaworld is an impressive feat: panoramic, scrupulous, and written with both distance and curiosity. It shows how Diana became a mirror for a country no longer sure of itself, how her image absorbed the griefs of a declining empire and turned them into daytime TV. “Diana, remember you’re a Spencer,” she would tell herself. We remember too. Not just the princess, but the pyre.
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