LADY IN WAITING
MY EXTRAORDINARY LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF THE CROWN
ANNE GLENCONNER
Hodder, 336pp, £20
Lady Glenconner, now aged 87, has produced a ‘candid, witty and stylish memoir’, according to Miranda Seymour in the Financial Times. Glenconner was born Anne Coke, the first of three sisters, and was a ‘big disappointment’ to the family as there was no direct heir to the man who would become the fifth Earl of Leicester. She was a maid of honour at the Queen’s coronation, and in 1956 married Lord Glenconner – described by Richard DavenportHines in the Times as a ‘wayward Prince Charming’. She became lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret in 1971, and ‘there is no doubt that Margaret could be inconsiderate and despotic, but Lady Anne remembers the hoots of laughter and bouts of giggles. These chapters are a lesson in how to write with patient loving sympathy, but without any protective fibs, about a difficult friend,’ according to Davenport-hines.
‘Discretion and honour emerge as the hallmarks of Glenconner’s career as a royal servant, culminating in this book which manages to be both candid and kind,’ wrote Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian. ‘Above all, she demonstrates a remarkable readiness to own up to her own mistakes.’ If only, Hughes concluded, ‘members of the present royal family would follow their admirable servant’s example of honest selfreckoning and personal responsibility’. ‘In the end,’ said Rachel Cooke in the Observer, ‘[Glenconner’s] book isn’t only a record, funny and sometimes dazzling, of a way of life now almost disappeared. It’s an unwitting examination of English repression: both of how it gets you through and of how it can slay you.’