Princess Diana's story keeps being remade 29 years after Paris crash, Charles Spencer memoir reignites debate

Diana after Diana: a life remade in death

Twenty-nine years ago, on 31 August 1997, a woman was “hunted” to her death. And yet her carcass still finds its way onto paper and television screens, every few years hollowed out, stuffed and reconstructed into whatever we think it is best for her to become.

Diana Frances Spencer, who later became the Princess of Wales, has lived two lives but has been only allowed to die in one of them. There is the Diana who lived, and died as the paparazzi hunted her on a fateful night on the roads of Paris. And there is a Diana we keep after her death, one we constantly remake and eulogise.

She now exists as versions — a princess, a wife, a mother, a fashion icon, a beguiled lover, a kind-hearted woman, a celebrity, a victim — but did all these versions truly belong to her or do we continue to impose her with a history we create in the present?

Charles Spencer's memoir revives royal rift

This month, Diana’s younger brother, Charles Spencer, has painted his version of his sister onto the pages of a memoir titled, ‘Swan Song: Diana, My Sister’. And in an excerpt from the book he creates a portrait of the relationship the now-King Charles shared with his first wife.

According to Spencer, in the days after Diana’s death, he and the then-Prince Charles argued over whether William and Harry should walk behind their mother’s coffin. Spencer recalls Charles ending the argument with the words: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.”

Buckingham Palace has disputed the recollection, saying that grief can cloud memory and affect judgement but Spencer has stood firm by his account.

“But is Charles right, have we forgotten Diana in her essence and replaced her with a mythologised version? To even pose this question is absurd, twenty-nine years from her death our eyes and ears still follow her,” the piece notes.

The remaking of Diana in life and after

Perhaps we should have seen this coming, Diana was being remade long before she died. Even when she was alive, the world was already busy deciding what she meant. Prescribing meaning onto her every move, making a photograph of her as a child evidence of her love for children. Her tears could become evidence of her sensitivity, her unhappiness could become a story about the woman trapped inside the institution.

Edward White, author of Dianaworld, describes her as a cultural “cut-and-shut” — a term borrowed from the practice of welding parts of different wrecked cars together to make something that looks whole from a distance. Diana, he argues, became a figure made up of very different, sometimes contradictory identities.

Even her designers were not simply dressing a princess, they were helping construct one. Catherine Walker spoke of creating an “Arthurian Princess” for one of Diana’s Middle Eastern tours, while another dress deliberately invoked Elizabeth I. Even her image could be made to carry history, fantasy and national mythology.

Diana travels and changes

Even in her death, Diana travelled, and as she travelled she changed. For some people in Pakistan, White wrote, she became something closer to the daughter-in-law that an Asian family might recognise. After her death, a reader writing in the Eastern Eye even imagined her as “Raj Kumari Diana ji of Southallpur”, giving the Princess of Wales an Indian honorific and, jokingly, an imaginary kingdom of her own.

For some South Asian communities, Diana’s story came to carry their own tensions with family, tradition and individuality. She became the daughter-in-law who rebelled against familial expectations, young brides could identify with her.

Talking to TOI, Apoorva Jyoti, a young woman in her early 20s based out of Pune, shared what she felt about the late Princess. Someone so distant from the princess, in both place and time, still has pieces of her she remembers. The first words that came to her were “People’s Princess”.

Then came the Diana who helped destigmatise HIV and AIDS, the Diana who worked with NGOs and charities, the Diana who cared for people at a ground level, the Diana who had a “very horrible” and “very tumultuous” marriage, the Diana who faced “a lot of patriarchy”, the Diana who was graceful, fashionable, empathetic and “very ahead of her time”.

She called her an “amazing role model”, particularly for women, and described her as a “princess of dreams”, someone whose influence was remarkable precisely because she had been given a position that separated her from ordinary people and yet seemed able to reach them.

“Her death was ‘extremely tragic’, her life almost too extraordinary to have been real, more like something you would watch in a film or on television,” the article notes.

Spencer remembers her as his Diana, his elder sister; the Palace has their version of her; and we, some who weren’t even born back then, have our version, constructed secondhand, through screens and pages. And in all this remembrance, the woman herself becomes harder to see.

“When she was alive the cameras hunted her and in her death, we hunted for her. We become the paparazzi.”