The Windsor Affair
The British royal family is rarely out of the headlines, and Melanie Benjamin tackles one of its most serious crises in this story centered around the women most closely tied to the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936. The Windsor Affair approaches events from the perspectives of Wallis Simpson and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the women who married David and Bertie Windsor, brothers who would go on to become Edward VIII and George VI respectively. Wallis and Elizabeth believe they have nothing in common, but they’re both vain, egotistical, proud, and also, in their own different ways, faithful and loving towards their Windsor men. They’re also enemies. To Elizabeth, Wallis is ‘that woman’ while Wallis and David snigger at Elizabeth, calling her ‘Cookie’ and decrying her lack of taste and her generous waistline.
Benjamin gives voice to both women with snappy prose and sparkling dialogue. It’s a critique of both but also a nuanced one, bringing in Wallis’s hardscrabble upbringing and Elizabeth’s insecurities and her loneliness after her early widowhood. Occasional interjections from Queen Mary, David and Bertie’s mother, add to the fun. “Windsor men,” she opines, are weak.” The Windsor women, she insists, are the strong ones, explaining that Windsor men “are made – or ruined – by their wives.”
Fans of Benjamin’s novels will enjoy references to characters from past works, including Babe Paley and Anne Lindbergh, and anyone who enjoyed The Crown, or royal-watching in general, shouldn’t miss this.
