Princess Diana Devoured 'Pulp Romance' as a Teen and It May Hold a Clue to Her Heartbreak (Exclusive)

Simon Perry, Erin HillThu, June 18, 2026 at 1:58 PM UTC

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Princess Diana wears the Spencer family tiara on April 11, 1983 in Brisbane, Australia ; Diana and Prince Charles on their wedding day on July 29, 1981 in London.Credit: Anwar Hussein/WireImage ; David Levenson/Getty -

Catherine Mayer's new book Divide and Rule explores how Princess Diana's compassion and romantic idealism shaped her life and marriage

The author argues that Diana's devotion to romance novels influenced the kind of love she hoped to find in real life

Mayer describes Diana and Prince Charles as "two damaged innocents" who entered their 1981 wedding with doubts and conflicting expectations

Princess Diana's compassion became one of her defining qualities, helping earn her a place in the hearts of millions around the world. But in Divide and Rule: Royal Women and Their Battles (out June 23), journalist and royal author Catherine Mayer examines the forces that shaped not only Diana, but the modern British royal family itself.

The book explores how personal relationships, family dynamics and competing expectations have influenced the monarchy across generations of royal women. In one section, Mayer turns her focus to Diana, portraying the late princess as a woman whose extraordinary capacity for empathy was matched by a deep belief in romance — and whose hopes for love often collided with reality.

In the exclusive excerpt below, Mayer traces Diana's compassion from her school days to her groundbreaking work with AIDS patients, explores the fairy-tale notions of love she embraced as a teenager and revisits the doubts that surfaced before her 1981 wedding to then-Prince Charles.

Credit: HQ

Long before she became the "People's Princess," Diana's friends recall a young woman whose compassion set her apart.

At school, Diana and other pupils were assigned voluntary service roles in the local community. Hers was to visit an elderly woman. While many of her contemporaries did the bare minimum demanded of them, Diana put in extra hours, sometimes cutting class to see her new and lonely charge. "She was, without doubt, one of the most compassionate and empathetic people I've ever met," says one of her oldest friends. From her first walkabouts, Diana reached out to the strangers who reached towards her. In 1987, she famously held the hand of an AIDS patient, at once challenging myths around the transmission of the disease and the homophobia of diagnosis often unleashed. It matters that she did this on camera and continued to be seen with AIDS patients, but she did not do it in order to be on camera. In private, she made many more such visits.

She was an inveterate hugger. Hundreds of images show her embracing members of the public, friends, family, spreading her arms as wide as wings to enfold her sons. It made spaces between Diana and Charles all the more conspicuous as their marriage decayed.

Lady Diana Spencer in 1971Credit: Central Press/Getty

Yet Mayer argues that the same emotional openness that endeared Diana to millions was shaped by a longing for connection that began long before she entered the royal family.

Diana's childhood left scars too, underpinning her determination to avoid divorce while simultaneously making such a fate more likely. She was a product of the collapse of the marriage of her parents, Johnny, the 8th Earl Spencer and Frances. Spencer went on to marry Raine, Countess of Dartmouth — her mother was the romantic fiction novelist Barbara Cartland, who showered Diana's world with pulp romance.

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Diana devoured [Barbara Cartland novels] by the truckload and they were, one of her schoolfriends told Mayer, "The source of reading for her entire year. She literally had a whole drawer filled with these things."

If Diana failed to spot that Charles was incapable of giving her the love she craved, it cannot have helped that the love she craved was a fiction — a modern-day version of courtly love.

Charles fitted the Cartland mould in one respect: his emotional unavailability. The reticence of Cartland's heroes belies agonies of loneliness. Wounded by past trauma and hemmed in by convention, they hide the emotions — but never fear! A good woman can unlock their hearts.  It is a meme that repeats throughout every one of Cartland's 723 books and across the wider romance genre, including variations of the Cinderella story.

The wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer on July 29, 1981Credit: Shutterstock

By the summer of 1981, those dreams were colliding with reality. According to Mayer, concerns surfaced in the final days before the royal wedding.

At the last minute, she told her sisters that she wanted to call it off. They replied that it was too late; her face was on the tea towels. Her friends also had misgivings, as one of them recently revealed to Mayer. Charles seemed highly strung and petulant, getting himself in a lather about the loss of a cufflink just before the pre-wedding ball at Buckingham Palace. Surely, Diana's friends thought, he had hundreds of pairs. They only later understood the significance of the item, part of a set given to him by Camilla [Parker Bowles], as Diana was well aware.

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Mayer ultimately characterizes the marriage as a union between two people carrying their own burdens into an institution struggling to adapt to a changing world.

So it was that on 29 July 1981, two damaged innocents came together with conflicting expectations and similar reservations, under the glare of world attention, to serve an institution creaking under the weight of its own history.

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