Your head was always meant for a tiara.

Or a crown, maybe both. Elegant clothing was supposed to fill your ample closets and you were meant to have a maid or valet to help you dress. And yeah, glass slippers should be on your feet right now. Then again, being royalty can have its drawbacks: as you’ll see in “Dianaworld: An Obsession” by Edward White, it can be a royal pain.

Even as a child, young Diana Spencer was proud of her heritage.

By the time she was born, White says, “her family [was] a mighty social presence” in Great Britain, with many ties to the Royal Family. Little Diana often played with the Princes Edward and Andrew, and she supposedly met Prince Charles when she was just five years old and he was seventeen.

That age difference meant much less when the Prince was searching for a bride and Diana flirted with him at a “shooting weekend” event. Soon, they were engaged, though they only “spent time together… a handful of times” and the marriage was broken before it scarcely began.

You probably know how it ended, and how her life ended, too.

And yet, nearly twenty-eight years after her death, Diana continues to fascinate people.

Says White, the frenzy over royal-watching compounded when it appeared that the “world’s most eligible bachelor” had found his princess, and the paparazzi were relentless. Every outfit Diana wore was scrutinized, condemned, and mimicked; she was criticized for being candid, and for being overly-drama. She seemed to think that “part of her solemn duty was to appear as the Princess of Wales as often as possible” but she also apparently disliked what happened when she did. She shook up the Royal Family’s status quo by refusing to participate in stiff-upper-lip-ness or emotional distance, and that touched the hearts of many.

Here we are, a generation removed from August 31, 1997, and there is still only one Diana for a lot of people. Those are the readers for whom “Dianaworld: An Obsession” seems to have been written, and you can think about this book in two basic parts.

Author Edward White takes a deeper-than-usual look at Princess Diana’s life, mostly as a Royal, but you’ll also read about her before and her after. Alas, those who arose in the dark to watch her wedding in 1981, or who cried when she died won’t find much new. Heavy sigh.

What you will find, however, is a subtle new attitude about Diana, as seen through a backward lens. Gone is the gushing, in favor of facts. There’s snark here, and some degree of gossip but it feels fresh, maybe because the blast of Diana books has been a trickle in the last decade. We’re not inundated with Diana, so this book feels right, right now.

Despite that, forever fans of the Princess will get the most out of it. And if that’s you, well, you know the assignment. “Dianaworld: An Obsession” is a book to wrap your fingers and your head around.

“Dianaworld: An Obsession” by Edward White
c.2025, W.W. Norton
$32.50
402 pages