It's all in good fun for an American to wake up early for Harry and Meghan's royal wedding or to binge-watch "The Crown." But it doesn't seem like it's very much fun to be a royal, especially on a hot summer's day while wearing pantyhose. Before Fergie and Diana, Princess Margaret was the original unhappy princess. Margaret was Queen Elizabeth's younger sister, the more glamorous and mischievous of the pair, whose love for Group Captain Peter Townsend was so cruelly thwarted.

In Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, award-winning journalist Craig Brown offers an acerbic biography of the star-crossed princess, one that is hilarious and bittersweet in turns. The chief biographical events of Margaret's life—her doomed affair with Townsend, her unhappy marriage to Tony Snowden, her taste for bohemia and louche '70s vacations on the Caribbean island of Mustique—are told with a postmodern flair. All of these stories have been told countless times already, and Brown rather brilliantly parses the different accounts for what they tell us about the teller. Brown considers all the angles of many apocryphal stories, especially the ribald ones.

All of this makes for a surprisingly substantial page-turner. Brown's gift for satire is tempered with a genuinely humane portrayal of the emptiness of the princess's life. Yes, she was a ruthless snob and an appalling dinner guest, but what else? If she became a caricature of herself in later life, it was—as Brown suggests—because her act mirrored the ridiculous behavior of her aristocratic groupies. Brown's book is highly recommended for all American royal-watchers.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In this biography from noted satirist Brown, one expects and gets an effective skewering of both its subject, England's Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (1930–2002), only sister to the reigning Queen Elizabeth II, and the entire royal industry and its hangers-on, yet a small balm of sympathy for Margaret is added to the mix. Relegated by chance of birth to a secondary position—always a princess, never a queen—Margaret meandered through life performing official royal duties and acts of personal self-indulgence, which Brown bounds through in 99 chapters of diaries, essays, minutiae, and a few imaginings of his own. The expected portrait emerges of Margaret as snobbish and exacting, an inveterate rank-puller and a dreadful dinner guest—and also a woman who turned to alcohol and affairs to fill up the empty tedium between charity visits and ribbon cuttings. VERDICT Readers wanting a straightforward biography should look elsewhere, but those interested in a sometimes hilarious, sometimes gloomy view of Princess Margaret through a variety of lenses, or a look at how popular representation shapes our view of a public figure should snap up this book.—Kathleen McCallister, Tulane Univ., New Orleans

Chatty, catty, and intelligent, Brown's portrayal in vignettes of Britain's Princess Margaret (1930–2002) draws from published memoirs, interviews, and diaries. The "disobedient, attention-seeking" Margaret, writes critic and satirist Brown (One on One), grew up suffering in comparison to her older sister, who became Queen Elizabeth II. As "the one who wouldn't ever be first," Margaret was born to fulfill menial duties such as "the patronage of the more obscure charity, the glad-handing of the smaller fry." She captured the world's sympathy with her first, doomed romance to Royal Air Force pilot Peter Townsend (he was divorced and the queen refused to grant Margaret permission to marry him). "The rest of us are allowed to forget a youthful passion, but the world defined Princess Margaret by hers," writes Brown. Margaret was a magnet for people who were "mesmerized less by her image than by the cracks to be found in it." She was invited to events because she could be counted on to misbehave deliciously: "The presence of the Princess would endow a party with grandeur; her departure would be the signal for mimicry to commence." Brown is sympathetic to the plight of a woman who, as a friend said, was "one of the cleverest women... I have ever met, and she never really had an outlet for her intelligence." Brown's entertaining vignettes form a collage portrait of a rebellious anti-Cinderella. (Aug.)