Divisive figure

SARAH GRISTWOOD isn’t entirely convinced by a biography that reassesses the life and times of Wallis Simpson

Untitled: The Real Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor by Anna Pasternak William Collins, 368 pages, £20 Anna Pasternak is a brave woman. Untitled is pitched as the first positive biography of Wallis Simpson, the woman we love to hate. The adventuress who stole our king away, the Wicked Witch of the West dressed by Mainbocher – and Dior, and Saint Laurent, and Givenchy…

Wallis undoubtedly did Britain a favour in causing the erratic Edward VIII to be replaced by his dutiful brother Bertie. Noel Coward even said that every town in England should erect a statue to her. All the same, Pasternak has her work cut out if she hopes to rewrite the usual narrative of this fascinating royal story.

Pasternak’s villains are the palace people bound by their prejudices, and the politicians seizing on Mrs Simpson as means to oust a problematic king. Her Wallis is above all a victim and one whose royal fling was never meant to disrupt her marriage to the long-suffering Ernest Simpson.

It was only her lover’s scalp-prickling neediness that saw Wallis stranded in a situation she had provoked. She was “like an animal in a trap” and begged the new king not to abdicate, but rather to set her free. “You and I would only create disaster together,” she wrote to him.

So far, so fair, perhaps. But there are a hefty body of charges against both Edward and Wallis, and Pasternak’s eager partisanship is not enough to refute them. The idea that Wallis ensnared Edward with sexual tricks learned in eastern brothels can perhaps safely be dismissed in a few sentences; the question of whether the pair had dangerous fascist leanings, less so.

The key issue is whether the Windsors’ sympathy for Nazi Germany continued, treasonously, into the war years. Pasternak castigates the royal family for believing slurs about the duchess’s loyalty, rather than considering “hard and consistent evidence to the contrary”. But she does not herself produce any real evidence to take the suspicion away. Meanwhile, unlike Anne Sebba’s not unsympathetic That Woman, she doesn’t offer social context over why it was so unthinkable for the king to marry a risque divorcee.

In one sense, however, Pasternak does achieve her goal of winning sympathy for (making a point of giving

A key issue is the Windsors’ sympathy for Nazi Germany

Wallis the HRH title she was denied in life) “Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Windsor”. Whatever her sins, Wallis Simpson surely paid for them in those long years of exile. “A woman always pays the most,” she had written, prophetically.

Pasternak’s book was consciously written at a moment when another royal prince has married another American divorcee. Perhaps the real lesson to take from it is a warning against casting famous women as either sinners or saints, as media and public alike do all too readily.