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of writing, the topic of Diana is very popular and of interest to people. Furthermore, this research
project is important because even excluding the anniversary of Diana’s death, there is a continued
interest in royal families, especially the British Royal Family, even though royals do not have the
same function as they had before, and because Diana is still a prominent cultural icon in British
culture even today.
1.1 Literature review
A great deal has been written about Diana from newspaper articles and pieces of gossip to
biographies and obituaries. There is also an abundance of other material on her besides the written
works, for example, TV-interviews, documents, news clips and video recordings including recordings
of her wedding and funeral. The range of material being so wide and the quality
of them varying to
a great degree, going through them and finding the material suitable for academic research has
been a demanding task requiring a large amount of time and patience. The literature on Diana has
been considerably affected by the views of the writer in that most of the writing is subjective,
portraying her either as a saint or as a manipulative woman depending on whether the writer
sympathises with her or with her husband Charles, the Prince of Wales, and the rest of the Royal
Family. There are also biographies written by Andrew Morton, which are based on tape-recorded
interviews that James Colthurst conducted with Diana herself in secret (Brown, 2008, p. 329), and
these books are widely used as a reference in other books about her as well, so the recordings form
an indirect base for any writing about her. After all, it is first-hand information from Diana herself,
and not from some unknown source wishing to remain anonymous but saying that they had been
very close to Diana during her life. In addition to looking at different biographies about Diana other
sources will be looked at as well.
Due to the fact that a great many tabloid-style and scurrilous books have been published about
Diana that focus on different aspects and parts of her life and personality, as already mentioned
above, I have decided to use five different types of biographies on Diana as a primary source for the
thesis. These five biographies include maybe the most notable Diana biography
Diana: Her True
Story – In Her Own Words written by English journalist and writer Andrew Morton and first published
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The fourth biography used as a primary source during this research is
Diana: The Life of a Troubled
Princess by author Sally Bedell Smith, which was first published in 1999. It is a very balanced account
of Diana’s life, but focuses more on her psychological problems and her bulimia than the other four
biographies, and because of that is a worthwhile addition to the biographies studied as it describes
Diana’s mental state at different times of her life in a way the other four biographies do not.
However, the trouble with Smith’s book is the fact that it is impossible to precisely know what was
going on in Diana’s mind at a certain time, and because of that not everything that is said about her
psychological problems can be taken as the absolute truth.
Besides the four biographies mentioned above that depict Diana’s life from her birth to her death,
a useful addition to the collection of books about Diana is
Diana: Her Last Love by author Kate Snell
that focuses mostly on Diana’s last years and her feelings during them. The fact that it has as its
focus the years of Diana’s life when she was no longer an official part of the Royal Family makes it
an interesting read because the reader may see the part the Royal Family and her status in it played
in her life even after the divorce. Snell’s book may at its core depict a love story, but it does so with
special emphasis on Diana’s thoughts and feelings during those times without becoming too much
like a romance novel. It also sheds some light on a part of Diana’s life that has not been discussed in
such detail in the other books.
However, the choice of major and notable works written about Diana and her life depends on the
reader and how they are to be used, because there have been many
books published about her by
various authors ranging from writers to journalists and to people that have, at some point, worked
for the Royal Family. The choice is a matter of what the reader sees as the most helpful for them
and as the most trustworthy and useful sources about Diana. It also depends on whether the reader
is looking for an objective or subjective view about Diana and her life. Despite this, the five books
mentioned above were found to be the most helpful in this type of research because of their
contents and the way in which they have been written, and because they provide a many-sided
picture of Diana ranging from an objective depiction to a fairly subjective and gossipy one.