The First Lady Diana: Lady Diana Spencer 1710-1735

While many have been captivated by the story of Diana, Princess of Wales, few may realize that her life paralleled in notable ways that of an ancestor who bore the same name. Like her famous 20th-century namesake, the 18th-century Lady Diana Spencer was born into a prominent family of British aristocrats, made a brilliant marriage and died young. Massey (an artist and author and illustrator of girls' stories) draws on a wealth of letters and historical documents to reconstruct in detail the life of ""dear little Di"" (as her family called her, although she grew to be quite tall). Orphaned young, Diana was taken in and raised by her grandmother, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who saw to it that she was well married at the then late age of 21 to the Duke of Bedford. One of the most notorious figures of the day, the duchess was tremendously rich, politically powerful and brashly outspoken, and by this account, Diana grew up very much in her shadow--so much so that, despite Massey's efforts to keep her narrative centered on its ostensible subject, it is actually Sarah who becomes its most compelling and well-rounded character. Diana herself remains an enigma: described as warm-hearted and generous by some contemporaries and vain and insincere by others, she apparently died (at 25, of tuberculosis) before developing much of a personality in her own right. Since Massey commendably refuses to embellish upon the known facts of Diana's life by surmising her thoughts and feelings, she produces the story of an era in the history of the British aristocracy rather than of an individual. Photos. (Feb.) FYI: Another flamboyant 18th-century relative of Diana, Princess of Wales, is chronicled in Amanda Foreman's Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (1999).