3 Review(s)

She was the first person to be named Woman of the Year by Time magazine, and yet Wallis Simpson remains one of the most reviled women in history. The social climbing divorcee is remembered as a snob and voluptuary who came close to destroying the British monarchy. But could she have been the pawn of Allied statesmen determined to remove a Nazi sympathiser from the throne? This memoire, found in her former Paris home, is said to have been written in the Duchess' own hand. And although the Duchess is a highly unreliable narrator, Kate Auspitz, an American historian, is a meticulous scholar, supplying pages of endnotes that ground the story firmly in published recollections of the major figures of the time. The plot rests on little-known historical details that make Wallis's role in the events entirely plausible.