Meryle Secrest Princess Margaret & the Curse : An Inquiry into a Royal Life

A Groundbreaking New Perspective of Princess Margaret by Renowned Biographer Meryle Secrest Meryle Secrest, distinguished biographer in the arts and humanities, and recipient of a White House Medal, has turned her focus to royalty. In Princess Margaret and the Curse, she has put the conventional view of a muchreviled Princess on its head. Her latest study, which she considers more of an investigation than a biography as such, proposes that nobody knows the truth about the fabled, doomed Princess. She is the first person to have looked at Princess Margaret in a particular family context. That is to say with reference to her mother, Elizabeth BowesLyon, the daughter of a famous, harddrinking Scottish family that had inhabited an ancient dwelling, Glamis Castle, for centuries. Her older brothers were already renowned for their prowess in alcohol consumption. Decades later, once she became Queen Mother, this Elizabeth would begin to imbibe by eleven in the morning. She was already lamenting the loss of her "drinking powers" when, because of severe bouts of morning sickness during her first pregnancy with the future Queen Elizabeth in 1926, she could not drink. Four years later, while pregnant with Princess Margaret in 1930, she was not so handicapped. Doctors believed it was perfectly safe for a mothertobe to drink, so she drank. The doctors were wrong. But it took another fortythree years, until 1973, before new studies established that alcohol in any amount was poisonous to... | Meryle Secrest Princess Margaret & the Curse : An Inquiry into a Royal Life