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65 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A true story of royal life, October 12, 2000
This review is from: Shadows Of A Princess: An Intimate Account by Her Private Secretary (Hardcover)
This book has been touted as another Diana "tell-all", but in reality it is Patrick Jephson's chronicle of his seven years of service with the Princess. Diana was Jephson's boss and of course plays a very large part in his memoir, but we are also provided with a fascinating look at the reality of royal life. This book shows us the amazing amount of work that both the royal person, and their employees, put into the seemingly effortless public appearances that are their royal "duty". Additonally, the book offers a very close look at the Princess and her behavior. Diana's portrayal in this book challenges previous characterizations of her as an out-of-control woman who was perhaps also mentally ill. The Princess that Jephson worked for was shrewd, if not intelligent then street smart, and clearly determined to be the best Princess possible. Perhaps her motives were not the best - for Diana was clearly engaged in a game of "one-upmanship" with the royal family, and in particular with the Prince of Wales. It appears, though, that Diana truly did have a desire to help the disadvantaged and ill, and if there was a good photo opportunity in providing that help, so much the better. I admired the Diana in this book, for Jephson shows us again and again that no matter how awful she may have been feeling, the Princess always managed to pull herself together and put on the required show at public appearances. Jephson also illustrates for us what I think was Diana's fatal flaw. Although the Princess was able to pour love out, in most cases to complete strangers, she seemed unable to receive love herself. We see how, over and over, she pushes away those who truly cared for her, and who wanted to help her. The book also chronicles the sad disintigration of the royal marriage, and touches on Diana's attempts to find love outside of that marriage, but really there is no indiscreet spilling of intimate details here. It is obvious that Patrick Jephson truly admired the Princess. Fans of Diana will clearly wish to read this spellbinding tale of her working life.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Shadows of a Princess, July 19, 2001
P.D. Jephson's book about Princess Diana has been accused of being a breach of trust, too hard on Diana, and poorly written. I agree that Jephson wasn't ethical in violating his confidentiality agreement, but unfortunately this fault has been committed by many others, with less well-written results. I also agree that at times Jephson doesn't give Diana the benefit of the doubt. For example, can ANYONE do good works with completely pure motives? I think not. After all, most of us, like Diana, want to help people, but we also want to get recognition and personal satisfaction from it. Why should that be a problem? However, especially in Part II of the book, I believe that Jephson shows genuine concern and admiration for Diana, making her seem much more of a real person than most of the other books about her. We are all at times either secretly or openly insecure, controlling, or moody, so I can relate to Diana as a complex human being just like the rest of us. As far as Jephson's style, some have said that the book is more about him than about Diana, but most biographical memoirs reveal as much about the author as the person they're describing. Boswell's famous diaries about Samuel Johnson, for example, talk a great deal about Boswell himself and no one seems to mind. Jephson also gives fascinating insights into how the Royal Family lives and the historical significance of their actions, which greatly added to my interest in the book. Jephson's supposed "stream of consciousness" style seems to have confused some readers, but I felt that his combination of events and inner thoughts was generally successful in giving depth to his narrative. I'm an English teacher who focuses on teaching writing, so I seldom can bear to read the simplistic prose of the average modern memoir. But it was Jephson's STYLE that kept me reading his book. He uses more sophisticated sentence patterns, vocabulary, and figurative language than the average writer, along with unusually thoughtful insights. Whether one agrees with him is not the point; at least his observations are sufficiently intriguing to merit a lively discussion. And although he occasionally repeats similar material, overall I found the structure of the book clearly chronological. While the pace of the book does bog down slightly in the middle, the first and last parts of the book are fast-paced and riveting.
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A plod for readers, a gift for historians, November 25, 2000
This review is from: Shadows Of A Princess: An Intimate Account by Her Private Secretary (Hardcover)
After hearing all the outraged opinions from the press and the Royal Family, I was expecting an exciting, dramatic account of Princess Di's behind-the-scenes life. Sadly, this is not the case. The book is not well-written - it is largely a collection of anecdotes jumbled together with no obvious pattern beyond chronology. While this can be informative, as the author clearly knows and can describe all the gritty details behind the beautifully staged events the public saw, the stories about Diana leap about erratically, showing her by turns as shallow, concerned, tasteless, thoughtful, calculating and vulnerable. I've no doubt she was all those things and more, but the book keeps presenting these disconnected vignettes without any overarching thesis or clue as to what any of them add up to. This is perhaps the result of an author who is not a writer, but the book would have benefitted from someone who could have imposed a bit of discipline on the process. One problem I had with the book was the impression I got that the author is not really a very nice or likeable man. This is no criticism of the work he did for the Princess - it sounds as if he was very good at his job, and his personality was suited to the tasks he had to carry out - but his company for an entire book is rather wearing. I have a feeling he never got over his cockiness at having landed such a plum job, and his confessions of failure or weakness come a little too frequently to sound like genuine humility. Like his boss, Jephson seems to be always checking his image, and doing whatever he thinks the reader will require to stay on his side. With these criticisms said, I still think that the book will be valuable to future historians who will want to study Diana unemotionally, without the fog of sentimentality that still surrounds her. Jephson's book is, in a way, a perfect reflection of one aspect of Diana - her lifelong struggle to somehow turn dross into gold, and her ultimate failure. For all his relating of her public triumphs and press success, in the end she amounts to very little. Jephson harps incessantly on how "royal" she was, and the final conclusion must be, 'If this is what royalty amounts to, then there's not much to it.' With pretty looks and smooth surface sincerity, even a nobody like Diana Spencer could achieve royalness. Perhaps this is the revelation that the house of Windsor finds the most intolerable of all.
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