The shy teenager who married a prince. The betrayed wife trapped in an unhappy marriage. The glamorous rebel who challenged the House of Windsor. The compassionate princess who captured the world’s heart. Thirty years after her death, these familiar versions of Diana have hardened into legend. But they tell only part of her story.

This major new biography examines afresh the woman behind the myth.

Drawing on a remarkable range of testimony and contemporary evidence, A Very British Girl traces Diana’s transformation from an insecure young aristocrat into the most famous woman in the world. Vulnerable yet formidable, emotionally impulsive yet increasingly sophisticated in her understanding of her own power, Diana was neither simply the victim of an unfeeling institution nor the calculating media manipulator portrayed by her critics.

What emerges instead is the story of a monarchy confronted by a new kind of public figure – and of a woman who learned to harness her extraordinary fame to redefine royal ideas of duty, emotion, motherhood and public service.

Authoritative, psychologically acute and compellingly told, A Very British Girl reclaims Diana from the mythology that surrounds her, revealing how the fairy-tale princess so familiar to millions became a woman who forever changed the world that survived her.

* Publishing in the USA as Diana: Triumph and Tragedy - Her Own Story *

© Jane Tippett 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027