England's Rose

So every time I go to New York to visit Steven, I bring this biography of Princess Diana with me to read on the bus. Diana is probably tied with Jackie Kennedy as my absolute favorite pop culture icon. I feel like there is something about her that can never be touched...maybe its the royal status, her interesting beauty, or the fact that she lived before the advent of the internet and its basic destruction of a person's mystery. The things I know about her are only the things that I can read in a book, or watch in a documentary (which believe me, run out fast). However, I never once have become bored of hearing the same facts and stories about her that I have heard probably a thousand times and know like the back of my hand.
That's why this biography I'm reading is so interesting. For so long I've heard the basic surface details of her life; her troubled childhood, her seemingly perfect marriage (which the archbishop of Canterbury, who officiated the ceremony, called "the stuff of which fairy tales are made..."), the divorce, her life after, and her ultimate untimely death. This book, however, gave me so much more information about Diana. For the first time I learned things about her that were not always so happy, or positive for that matter. For example, she was a poor student and she was nicknamed Duch, short for Duchess, because of her sometimes snobbish attitude. I think what the book made me realize most of all is that Diana was a real person, just like any of us, but still removed from our world. She was not one of the people. She was so aristocratically English that, in some circles, marrying Prince Charles (whose ancestors had established the royal House of Hanover, of which he is descended, hundreds of years after her own House of Spencer) was seen as her marrying down. She was a member of this elite club and never forgot it. For all the effort people put into making her into the myth and model of charity, beauty, kindness, and her title of "The People's Princess", she was still in fact an incredibly wealthy, priveleged woman who never had to think about a job, money or any of the other things we usually worry about day to day.
However, for all the material things she didn't have to worry about, Diana basically carried a world on her shoulders. She was just a shy girl of nineteen who was suddenly thrown into the world spotlight and became the future queen of England and the most photographed woman in the world...I would think that someone who has that on their mind would somehow not be able to function in the same world as the rest of us...I mean, could you imagine what it would be like to have your wedding watched by literally a BILLION people around the world?
In any case, I love Diana. I can't help but think that she was a pure and good person and everything the media and public made her out to be. I feel like she had to be a selfless person on some level to have accomplished all the good things she did. I also think there had to be something about her that made hundreds of millions of people the world over love her so dearly without even knowing her. In my mind, she will always be the innocent one, the one who wanted to help and the one who was simply put on this earth to bring beauty, kindness and love. One of the passages I love from the book talks about a moment from Diana's wedding that makes me feel she understood that she was here for a higher purpose than just her life alone and that somehow she would always be giving of herself for others to make the world a happier place. What she says to Charles, she seems to have said to the entire world.
"'There before the altar, Charles stood waiting for her: 'I remember being so in love with my husband that I couldn't take my eyes off him,'Diana recalled. "I just absolutely thought I was the luckiest girl in the world'
'You look beautiful,'he whispered to her. 'Beautiful for you,'she replied."