Twenty-nine years after her death, Princess Diana is still being rewritten, this time through the eyes of her brother, Charles Spencer.
“If a woman doesn't write about herself, she'll be written about as others wish”: a phrase attributed to Virginia Woolf that is hard not to recall today, on the 29th anniversary of Princess Diana's passing.
Diana's heart stopped in Paris on August 31, 1997, at the age of 36, after sustaining injuries in a car accident inside the Pont de l'Alma tunnel, following a chase by paparazzi.
But the pens around her did not stop. Since then, her life has been rewritten time and again, until it seemed that every era had its own Diana, every witness his own narrative, and every book a new woman bearing the same name.
Princess Diana: The 29th anniversary of her passing in her iconic appearance (Pinterest)
And today, twenty-nine years later, Diana is being written about once more. Another book, promising to correct accumulated narratives. As if absence had not closed the story, but opened it wide.
Yet amid all this noise, one question remains heavier than any answer: If she had been allowed to write, which Diana would she have chosen to leave us?
Since her passing, Diana has never left the public imagination. Biographies have been written about her, documentaries created, and her life reenacted in cinema and television.
In The Crown, her relationship with the royal family and her marriage to Prince Charles returned to the screen. In Spencer, released in 2021, an imaginative cinematic interpretation of a period in her life was presented.
Then came The Princess in 2022, which revisited her story through years of media archives. In Diana: In Her Own Words, the approach was different: an attempt to hear Diana herself through recordings in her own voice.
And so, between Diana of journalism, Diana of cinema, Diana of documentaries, and Diana as remembered by those who knew her, the images accumulated until the question of who she truly was became harder, rather than easier, to answer.
Princess Diana: The 29th anniversary of her passing (Pinterest)
Today, on the 29th anniversary of her death, Diana is preparing to be narrated once again.
This time, the narrator is neither a journalist, nor a historian, nor a director, but her younger brother, Charles Spencer.
On September 22, his book Swan Song: Diana, My Sister will be released, returning to their childhood and his relationship with his sister, through to the days surrounding her passing.
According to what has been announced, the book is not simply another biography to add to the long shelf of books about Diana. Spencer says he wants to confront some of the narratives and details that have been repeated about her for so long that they eventually acquired the quality of truth.
Princess Diana in the new book Swan Song: Diana, My Sister by her younger brother Charles Spencer (Instagram)
After all those years of watching others narrate his sister's story, he decided to offer his own version.
Yet the irony remains: even this time, when the voice comes from one of the circles closest to her, Diana is still being told through someone else's voice.
Spencer may be able to correct an event, deny a story, or reposition a detail. But can memory, no matter how intimate, ever offer the final version of a person? Perhaps not.
And that may be precisely why Diana will remain open to being written about again.
Princess Diana: The 29th anniversary of her passing with Mother Teresa (Pinterest)
But why, after twenty-nine years, does the world still want to know more about her?
The title “Princess of Hearts” was not simply another title attached to Diana. Somewhere between royal protocol and human vulnerability, she did something that shortened the distance between herself and the people.
She shook hands with AIDS patients at a time when fear and stigma surrounded them. She sat with patients, children, and the homeless. She walked through a minefield in Angola just months before her death.
These causes were not peripheral to her public presence. During her marriage, she was president or patron of more than a hundred charities, and some of that work continued into the final months of her life.
Perhaps Diana herself offered the sentence that best explains that connection, two years before her passing.
In her famous 1995 interview, when asked whether she expected to become queen, she said she would rather be “Queen in people's hearts.” She said she led “from the heart, not from the head,” believing that someone needed to reach out to people, love them, and show them that.
But somehow, it felt that she was trying to know the world.
Princess Diana: The 29th anniversary of her passing (Pinterest)
Between the woman who lived her life beneath photographers' lenses, the princess the public knew, the sister remembered by Spencer, and the woman who, through her recordings and interviews, tried to speak about herself, Diana remained present — but with many faces.
Since that day, whenever one biography closed, another opened. Whenever one voice faded, another emerged to tell us who she was.
And perhaps we will never know which version she would have chosen to write herself.
And here she is, returning today, as if we never knew her before.
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