Royal Sisters
Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret
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- £14.99
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- £14.99
Publisher Description
In Royal Sisters, Anne Edwards, author of the best-selling Vivien Leigh: A Biography and Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor, has written the first dual biography of Elizabeth, the princess who was to become Queen, and her younger sister, Margaret, who was to be her subject. From birth to maturity, they were the stuff of which dreams are made.
“I’m three and you’re four,” the future Queen, then a child, imperiously informed her sister. The younger girl, not understanding this reference to their position in the succession, proudly countered, “No, you’re not. I’m three, you’re seven.”
The royal sisters had no choice in their historic positions, but behind the palace gates and within the all-too-human confines of their personalities, they displayed tremendous individuality and suffered the usual symptoms of sibling rivalry. Royal Sisters provides an unprecedented and intimate portrait of these most famous siblings during their formative and dramatic youthful years. It is also one of the twentieth century’s most fascinating stories of sisterly loyalty.
Edwards’s book is an honest look at how the royal sisters feel toward each other, their parents, their close relations and the men whom they have loved. It openly discusses, with new insights and information, the romance of Elizabeth and Philip and the tragic aborted love affair between Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend, and it has a cast of characters ranging from the youthful sisters’ suitors to Winston Churchill and the entire Royal Family. It is also the story of the making of a queen, of the high drama of her situation in the Townsend affair, of the real effect their uncle’s abdication had on the sisters’ lives, and of the internecine feuds that have brewed within the Royal Family since that time.
Brought vividly to life through the many personal interviews of close royal associates, filled with new facts, previously unpublished anecdotes and photographs, Royal Sisters is a never-before-glimpsed look at the relationship of the Queen and Princess Margaret.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The lives of the royal sisters are affectingly revealed in Edwards's ( The DeMilles ) lengthy, crowded biography. Four years the elder, ``Lilibet,'' born in 1921, was studious and responsible even as a child--different from the blithe, entertaining and musically talented Margaret. But the two were, according to the book, loving and mutually supportive. When their uncle, Edward VIII, abdicated, the girls' parents reluctantly assumed the monarchy. Upon the death of their father, George VI, Elizabeth inherited the crown and the sad duty of forbidding Margaret to marry Peter Townsend, evidently the one love of her life. The author quotes from private correspondence and persons involved with the royal family and describes Elizabeth II's wedding and coronation gowns and jewels in nearly numbing detail. Despite the minutiae, the book, ending with the Townsend decision, leaves a lasting impression of the sisters as loyal to each other and their responsibilities. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC alternate; author tour.
