Long before Meghan Markle delighted the tabloids and infuriated England's Royal Family by setting her cap for a prince, there was Wallis Warfield Simpson â an American of humble beginnings, living in England with her second husband, who insinuated herself into high social circles and ended up the mistress of the heir to England's throne.
Anne Edwards, whose 'Road to Tara' was an exquisitely researched and informative look at the life of the author of 'Gone With the Wind', has, for some reason, chosen to present the Simpson biography as a novel. The reader is left constantly wondering which of the scenes and dialogue are made up whole cloth and which are quite likely true but cannot, for whatever reason, be substantiated to the degree demanded in a scholarly biography.
The overall story was front-page news in much of the world in the tumultuous years leading up to World War II â how the heir to the throne of England abdicated in order to marry the by-then twice-divorced Simpson. Edwards goes back much farther â to the early days of the 20th century and to a little girl shuffled between a loving but extremely proper grandmother and a feckless merry-widow mother whose impulsive but often unwise choices led to financial insecurity and even borderline homelessness for much of Bessie Wallis Warfield's youth. Edwards uses this live-by-your-wits childhood to create a young woman determined to have everything she feels the world has denied her, and to get it by any means possible. She's drawn as a combination of Scarlett O'Hara, Becky Sharp, and Eve Harrington who uses everyone she meets â her wealthy uncle Sol, her school friends, her extended family â to claw her way up the social ladder. At no time do we see Wallis (who dumped her inelegant first name in favor of her unique middle name as an adolescent) consider preparing herself for any career except that of wife, preferably to a man who can keep her in the style to which she would like to become accustomed. More than half the book follows Wallis through her first 20-some years and first two husbands before she finally meets Prince Edward and connives her way into his good graces.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for the American reader to accept is the widely-held notion that men of power and prestige have every right to keep a mistress. Marriage is business; sex is entertainment. And, within certain circles of upper-class British society, it was rather considered an honor to be cuckolded by a Royal. At any rate, that is how Edwards chooses to write the relationship between Wallis and the man who shared his wife with a Prince.
As the book draws to a conclusion, with Edward being pressured at the highest levels to give up his American mistress and take a royal wife, while he remains utterly adamant that he will have Wallis as his bride and queen, there's an eerily prescient scene in which Wallis is riding in a car being pursued by reporters and photographers, and her bodyguard urges the driver to flee at high speeds. It's almost the mirror image of a night half a century later when the Princess of Wales' driver took a similar tactic, but which ended in tragedy.
'Wallis: The Novel' is a near-miss that will send many readers looking for either a genuine biography or a no-holds-barred roman a clef which needn't be bothered with fussy historical accuracy.
Anne Edwards, whose 'Road to Tara' was an exquisitely researched and informative look at the life of the author of 'Gone With the Wind', has, for some reason, chosen to present the Simpson biography as a novel. The reader is left constantly wondering which of the scenes and dialogue are made up whole cloth and which are quite likely true but cannot, for whatever reason, be substantiated to the degree demanded in a scholarly biography.
The overall story was front-page news in much of the world in the tumultuous years leading up to World War II â how the heir to the throne of England abdicated in order to marry the by-then twice-divorced Simpson. Edwards goes back much farther â to the early days of the 20th century and to a little girl shuffled between a loving but extremely proper grandmother and a feckless merry-widow mother whose impulsive but often unwise choices led to financial insecurity and even borderline homelessness for much of Bessie Wallis Warfield's youth. Edwards uses this live-by-your-wits childhood to create a young woman determined to have everything she feels the world has denied her, and to get it by any means possible. She's drawn as a combination of Scarlett O'Hara, Becky Sharp, and Eve Harrington who uses everyone she meets â her wealthy uncle Sol, her school friends, her extended family â to claw her way up the social ladder. At no time do we see Wallis (who dumped her inelegant first name in favor of her unique middle name as an adolescent) consider preparing herself for any career except that of wife, preferably to a man who can keep her in the style to which she would like to become accustomed. More than half the book follows Wallis through her first 20-some years and first two husbands before she finally meets Prince Edward and connives her way into his good graces.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for the American reader to accept is the widely-held notion that men of power and prestige have every right to keep a mistress. Marriage is business; sex is entertainment. And, within certain circles of upper-class British society, it was rather considered an honor to be cuckolded by a Royal. At any rate, that is how Edwards chooses to write the relationship between Wallis and the man who shared his wife with a Prince.
As the book draws to a conclusion, with Edward being pressured at the highest levels to give up his American mistress and take a royal wife, while he remains utterly adamant that he will have Wallis as his bride and queen, there's an eerily prescient scene in which Wallis is riding in a car being pursued by reporters and photographers, and her bodyguard urges the driver to flee at high speeds. It's almost the mirror image of a night half a century later when the Princess of Wales' driver took a similar tactic, but which ended in tragedy.
'Wallis: The Novel' is a near-miss that will send many readers looking for either a genuine biography or a no-holds-barred roman a clef which needn't be bothered with fussy historical accuracy.
