A couple of friends of the princess who died in 1997 are preparing to auction off her handwritten letters.
A new part of Lady Diana’s private life is about to be revealed. Letters from the former Princess of Wales to a couple of friends during her divorce from Prince Charles, now King, will be auctioned on February 16 by Lay’s Auctioneers in Penzance, South Wales. west of England. 32 handwritten missives written in the mid-1990s, in which she notably accuses Buckingham of having tapped her phone.
As reported by Sunday Times, these letters were written to Susie and Tarek Kassem, two close friends of Diana. They explain that they decided to put them on sale because “owning these documents is a great responsibility” that they do not wish to bequeath to their children. The letters will be sold individually and are estimated in total at 90,000 pounds (about 101,000 euros) which will be donated to associations supported by the princess, who died in 1997 in a Parisian car accident at the age of 36.
“I’m on my knees”
Several of these letters mention the difficulties encountered by Diana during her highly publicized divorce from Charles. In particular a letter dated April 28, 1996:
“I’m going through very difficult times, the pressure is intense and it comes from all sides. Sometimes it’s too difficult to keep my head up, and today I’m on my knees. I just want this divorce to be finalized, well the price to be paid may be enormous.”
Always according to Sunday Timesshe assured in another letter that her phone at Kensington Palace was “constantly” tapped.
A “desperate and ugly” divorce
“If I had known a year ago what I would go through with this divorce, I would never have consented”, she confides in another extract dated 1996 and relayed by the DailyMail. “It’s hopeless and it’s ugly.”
The British daily notes several marks of Lady Diana’s affection for the Kassem couple, and interprets an extract as a reference to her tense relationship with the royal family:
“I’m immensely touched by the way you both seek to protect me…I’m not used to that!”
The sale of these letters comes after several months of embarrassment for the British royal family. Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, exiled in the United States, unveiled a Netflix documentary series at the end of December, in which they (again) discussed their difficult relationship with the Windsors. A few weeks later, in January, Prince Harry published his memoir titled The Alternate, the impact of which was worldwide. He notably revealed that his brother William “thrown him to the ground” during an argument about his union with Meghan Markle.
Before that, the fifth season of The Crownthe fiction which tells the bottom of the royal family, evoked last November the painful divorce of the princess and the prince of Wales.
