I've never quite understood the fascination with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and this book does nothing to explain their appeal. One would be hard put to find two people who better define the cult of celebrity: people famous chiefly for being famous; nor could you find two less attractive characters: vain, shallow, self-seeking and manipulative.
The book attempts to cast the Wallis Simpson and the man who abandoned his people on the eve of war "for the woman I love" in a sympathetic light, but even the author has to admit it is hard going. Their great love affair had very little of love in it, and Sebba details Wallis's increasingly desperate efforts to escape the trap she laid for herself when she indulged her vanity by seducing the Prince of Wales.
Sebba speculates that Wallis may have been born with a genetic disorder such as Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or even have been a "pseudo-hermaphrodite" --- a person born with male chromosomes and the internal sexual organs of a male but the external sexual organs of a female, as an explanation for her sexual insecurities, ambivalence, and manipulative, domineering personality. Sebba goes on to hint that the Prince who became King abdicated his throne because he was so obsessed with Wallis that he threatened to kill himself if she left him. She suggests he was so mentally unstable and unpredictable that his ministers were relieved to be rid of him. Wallis is portrayed as regretting the husband she was forced to shed, and furious when Ernest Simpson found consolation in the arms of her oldest friend, while she was left to cope with the Duke. For years after her marriage to the Duke, she continued to correspond with Ernest, complaining to him about "Peter Pan" (her derogatory nickname for the Duke).
A salutary meditation on a marriage made in hell.
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