The author chronicles her personal and professional life as lady-in-waiting and confidante to her childhood friend Princess Margaret, as well as her turbulent marriage and a motherhood marred by tragedy.
Being very common, I have something of a mania for aristo-lit: a passion for stories about big houses and the wanton eccentrics who inhabit them ... Nevertheless, I have to admit to being somewhat unprepared for Lady in Waiting ... Is [Glenconner's] memoir a horror show or a delightful entertainment? A manual for how to live, or how not to live? In truth, I’m not sure even she would know the answer to these questions ... Much as I loved reading about the way, say, that she and her mother, the countess, would gather jackdaw eggs using a ladle attached to a walking stick...after a while there’s no ignoring the painful and widening disjunction between the outward whirl of her life and the repeated tragedies that befall her family ... In the end, her book isn’t only a record, funny and sometimes dazzling, of a way of life now almost disappeared. It’s an unwitting examination of English repression: both of how it gets you through and of how it can slay you.
... a candid, witty and stylish memoir. It is as richly spiced with malice—I doubt if Bianca Jagger will relish the put-down of her own princessy ways, or Jerry Hall the spiky comments on her lack of social grace—as it is darkened by the tragedies that befell the author’s three sons, two of whom predeceased her. But the glory of this book—a banquet of imperious egos—derives from her reports from the front on life with Princess Margaret and life with, and quite often, without, her own late husband ... This is a more nuanced portrait of Margaret ... Amid the madness of it all, moments of real pathos glimmer through a sparkling surface.
...fascinating and beautifully written ... The first (pre-marriage) chapters of this book are marvellous too, proving that some people are just born writers. Anne’s descriptions of a charmingly unambitious girls’ boarding school and a finishing school in Devon are as sure as that of a top novelist ... I can’t recommend her book highly enough. It fills this Christmas’s Queen Mary-shaped hole — and is indeed a lesson on how to take whatever life throws at us.
