I do not consider myself to be obsessed with or even all that interested in the Royal Family of Great Britain. I'll glance at the tabloid headlines in the check out line at Giant Eagle and will tune in whenever there is a Royal Wedding (or funeral), but that's about the extent of it. And yet....and yet....I became a big fan of "The Crown" on Netflix, so what can I tell you?
It was probably because of "The Crown" that I was prompted to read a review of Wendy Holden's "The Royal Governess", and it was that review that prompted me to check this one out from the local library.
Historical fact: Marion Crawford was a Scottish college student studying to become a teacher and was determined to teach young children in "the slums" of Scotland to help them improve their lot in life. In 1932, at the age of 23, she was engaged by Elizabeth, the Duchess of York, to become governess and teacher to her two daughters, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. She would hold that position for sixteen years, until Princess Elizabeth married Phillip Mountbatten of Greece in 1947. I think you know what happened to them within the next five years or so.
So, how did the idealist teacher-to-be, a young woman with decidedly progressive and modern views of how society should operate, and how women in society should be treated, end up spending the prime years of her youth serving the most entitled family in the world, a family that, it can be kindly stated, had no sense of how modern British society, as it existed in the mid-twentieth century, at least, was evolving and how it should be functioning?
That is the story that Wendy Holden tells in this "novel of Queen Elizabeth II's childhood." There is a lot of melodrama and movie-of-the-week kinds of stuff in here. How Marion is continually torn between what she feels is her calling to help the disenfranchised poor and serving the privileged and wealthy Royal Family, particularly her young charges, Lilibet and Margaret. Lots of tales of loves lost or never realized because of her duty to the Crown. Soap Opera-y stuff like that.
There is also a lot of history covered here that "Crawfie", as she was christened by young Elizabeth, was witness to. The ascendency of the Prince of Wales to the throne as Edward VIII, and his subsequent abdication to marry the "woman he loved", American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson. In the novel, Crawfie, unlike her employers, comes across as sympathetic to Mrs Simpson, which I thought was interesting. (In fact, Ms Holden's next novel will be about Wallis Warfield Simpson).
The abdication, caused the Duke and Duchess of York to now become the King and Queen of England, and young Lilibet to become the heir to the throne. Life changed for everyone, as viewers of "The Crown" are continually reminded, but Crawfie remained. Unable to leave to pursue her own hopes, dreams, paths to romance yada yada yada.
She did come to love her two young charges, and probably had a greater hand in their upbringing - to believe the novel at least - than did her own parents, the King and Queen. But in the end, the divide never went away. The novel essentially ends when Elizabeth marries, and on the morning of her wedding, when Crawfie went in to see her to wish her well, the young women who was essentially raised by her, barely looks at her or pays her any attention. Elizabeth, in fact, comes across as a pretty cold fish, even as a young child and through her adolescence.
It's a readable and somewhat compelling book, but The Grandstander gives it only Two Stars. It does make an interesting companion piece to "The Crown" if you are an avid viewer of that series.
The life of the real Marion Crawford took an interesting turn after she left the service of the King and Queen. She was given the gift of a small cottage by the Crown in which to live for the rest of her life. She did get married, though it wasn't an ideal marriage, and she never had children of her own. In 1950, she put her name to series of magazine articles in Ladies Home Journal about her life as governess to the princesses, which became a book called "The Little Princesses." This was a no-no in the eyes of the Royal Family. The family that she had served so long and so loyally, and for whom she had sacrificed so much of her own personal life, cut her off completely. They never spoke of her or to her again. Letters to the princesses and the Palace were returned unopened. She was essentially purged from official records within the Family, to the point where even extensive biographies of the Royals fail to mention her or are even aware of her existence. When she died in 1988, no member of the Royal Family attended her funeral or even acknowledged her death.
Nice people, the Windsors.
The real Marion Crawford, the Royal Governess, with her two charges....
