For days on end, every step of the ceremony was choreographed and rehearsed at Westminster Abbey, but at night the apprentice courtier traded its splendor for her uncle’s flat, where she slept on a mattress on the floor.Īnd so this up-and-down life proceeded.
While on a similar mission in America via Greyhound bus, she was abruptly summoned home to be a maid of honor at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Born at Holkham, the fifth largest estate in England (but unable, because of her sex, to inherit it), young Anne loved riffling through the pages of her grandfather’s proudest possession, Leonardo’s Codex Leicester, and making dens in the attic from old masters “deemed too louche for the walls of the state rooms.” But just a few years later, she could be found lining up with her sponge bag to use the loo at a succession of seedy hotels for traveling salesmen as she set about hawking mugs and plates from the pottery her mother had established to help keep Holkham afloat. The pleasures of Glenconner’s tales must be winkled out of her sturdy if occasionally clichéd prose: revelations of the strange juxtapositions of an unexpectedly upstairs-downstairs aristocratic life. Those expecting the sort of dishy gossip Craig Brown served up in “99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret” or the diva turns wrought by Helena Bonham Carter in Season 3 of “The Crown” will find “Lady in Waiting” more of a challenge.
0 kommentar(er)
