There Were Three of Us in this Biography, So it Was a Bit Crowded: The Biographer as Suitor and the Rhetoric of Romance in Diana: Her True Story

Abstract

This paper explores how some of the major tropes of the romance genre have informed the structuring of Diana, Princess of Wales’s real-life story in Diana: Her True Story (1992). I focus on how the biographer Andrew Morton places himself in the position of ‘royal champion’ in the narratives both within and surrounding this text, and how his role in the construction of this biography attracted responses of outrage from the British social and media establishment.

Keywords

• andrew morton
• courtly love codes
• giselle bastin
• her true story
• princess diana
• romance narratives
• royal biography