| Gone with the Windsors |  | Author: Laurie Graham
Creator: Tara Ward
Publisher: Soundings
Category: Book
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Format: Audiobook
Media: Audio CD
ISBN: 1845593766
EAN: 9781845593766
ASIN: 1845593766
Publication Date: March 2006
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Scarlett O'Hara she may not have been, but according to this hilarious (and fictional!) account of Wallis Simpson's rise and fall, there was more than a passing resemblance between the two irrepressible shrews. Apart from sharing a penchant for the seemingly unattainable (usually male) and a certain knack for making do in times of adversity, both had an uncanny ability to drive their nearest and dearest to hell and back. Laurie Graham is back on top form with this diary of Maybell Brumby, Baltimore belle and hideously rich widow, as she travels to London in 1932 to visit sister Violet, married into the royalty-serving aristocracy. Bumping into old school-friend Wally and her second, somewhat dull husband Ernest, Maybell begins a roller-coaster journey from generous friend to unofficial lady in waiting. Life is a whirl of lunches, suppers, house parties, shopping and names. Who went where, what they wore, what they said, what they ate. Just when you think you can't take anymore of the endless frivolity, Maybell's diary takes on a darker edge, as the portents of doom come home to roost. Graham's remarkable skill of laying bare the psyches of Americans and Brits is never more evident. Here, the gauche and vulgar new world collides amusingly, and then dangerously, with the emotionally stunted, boorish nobility, who--to Maybell's disbelief--apparently prefer dodgy plumbing, surly staff and under-heated homes. Pithy one-liners, scattered liberally, lift the whole sorry debacle and make it not just entertaining, but insightful. Wally herself leaps out of these pages, initially as a sadly insecure social climber desperate for acceptance and later as a blue-print for the wicked witch of the west. The royal lap-dog follows her devotedly, begging for crumbs of affection, but it is the supporting cast, as always with Laurie Graham, that makes the difference. It is left to one of these to sum up. In response to Maybell's comment that: "It's a pity a sweet little king like David can't be allowed to marry the woman he loves", a rather more cynical friend of Wally's says: "If you ask me the real pity is that he doesn't love a better woman". Oh, how times have changed. Or not? ---Carey Green
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Witty and Acidic; My Favorite Combination August 10, 2008
It is 1932, and Maybell Brumby - recently of Baltimore; now of London - sits down with her diary and proceeds to share her perceptions of all that is happening around her. Her staid family, and her upper-class friends, including her old schoolmate Bessie Wallis Warfield, and "Wally's" new conquest, the Prince of Wales. Maybell thinks she's a lot smarter than she really is, and that's where most of the humour of this novel is found. Her discovery that one of her friends has invited a "coal porter" to a soiree and her astonishment at his mixing of the classes (and at the musical talent of someone who makes his living portering coal), is just one of her many upper class twit moments.
I might have given this five stars, except that the action slows down quite a lot after "Wally and David" get married and Maybell becomes The Duchess's Lady in Waiting. The humor sort of drifts away and these people become pathetic, rather than amusing. A shame really, because up until that point, it's a hugely entertaining romp.
 Loved it! April 29, 2008
I really loved this novel - extremely funny and well-written. Maybell Brumby has no idea, most of the time. She is kind, generous and with a heart of gold, and though she pretends to everybody, herself included that she is just another American society belle, there is a lot more to her than that. She comes to England to visit her sister Violet, lured by Violet's news that their old school friend, Wally "Minnehaha" Warfield is in London complete with husband. And through other schoolfriends, they meet Connie Thaw, whose sister just happens to be Thelma Furness, the Prince of Wales' current lover.... the rest, as they say, is history. In this case, history seen through Maybell's unique point of view.
the abdication, through a cocktail glass April 6, 2008
Laurie Graham has hit a rich seam lately with her series of hilariously insightful novels based on historical events, as observed by lowkey insiders. Gone with the Windsors tells the story of the abdication, through the eyes of Wallis Simpson's Baltimore schoolfriend, Maybell Brumby, now a wealthy widow whose sister Violet has married into the British establishment, offering her an entre in the dustier echelons of London society. The arrival of 'Minnehaha' Warfield, a pushy climber back home, and even more of a pushy climber in London, begins as a drawing room joke between the ex-pat Americans and their English friends, but Mrs Simpson's relentless campaign to scramble her way to the top soon drags Maybell into the domestic centre of an international crisis.
Laurie Graham's brilliance is in making the tiniest details reveal the deepest truths. Maybell's diary is initially just a charming airheaded list of people, cafes and clothes but it soon darkens as the stuffy but respectable Melhuishes, Kents and Yorks are elbowed aside by von Ribbentrops, sleazy opportunist Charlie Bedaux and, more worryingly, HItler himself. By recording the minutiae of the Prince and Mrs Simpson's life in such wearying detail - the callisthenetics, the shopping, the Martinis, the bickering - Graham perfectly conveys the claustrophobic golden cage Wallis builds for herself: the ascent to such lofty social heights is thrilling but there's precious little to do once you're up there. Wallis' growing pretensions to grandeur are amusingly awful, but when the Abdication crisis delivers her worst nightmare - a lifetime with the weak, petulant Prince but no compensatory throne - her hysterical demands reveal an undertone of sheer desperation, clear to the reader, if not Maybell. It's the clever, repeated context of Maybell and Wallis's shared childhood that keeps the reader from forgetting, as Mrs Simpson would like, that this almost-queen was not so long ago an ambitious, insecure charity case from Baltimore, and that trick keeps the sheer chutzpah of Wallis's story fresh. Even though you know what's coming, it's hard not to read with bated breath, hoping against hope that a shaft of sense will break through the Windsors' stifling self-obsession.
Set alongside the candyfloss-brained cocktail set are Maybell's sweet, deaf sister, Doopie, and her friend George Lightfoot, as well as Violet, Melhuish and their children, who provide the moral backbone of the novel, sounding the long, slow notes of real events looming in the background. While Maybell is helping the Prince fritter money on trinkets for Wallis, the Melhuishes are worrying about the political crisis in Germany. Their link with the hunting and shooting establishment allows Graham to depict both sides of the Abdication crisis with considerable sympathy; the Prince of Wales is shown to be scarred by his experiences in the First World War, at the same time as we hear Lightfoot's gentle warnings to Maybell that Hitler is rather more than a congenial host (if 'rather short in the leg').
Gone with the Windsors' real triumph, however, is that Laurie Graham has made Maybell's own story hold its own against the epic love tragedy playing in the background. She's a vividly drawn and likeable character, unwittingly amusing in her naivety, who emerges as a luckier survivor than her grim-faced friend, thanks to her fundamental good nature. The frenzied atmosphere of a society dancing on the brink of disaster is written with delicate skill, and the history seeps through subtly and in a way which underlines the truth that history is about real people, with feelings, ambitions, families and fears, not just dry facts and treaties. That the reader ends feeling rather sorry for the steel-jawed Mrs Simpson, having seen her life through the eyes of a dear friend, is some achievement.
 Gone With The Windsors March 31, 2008
This is a shame, there is clearly a really good book struggling to get out here, but I found the diary format unreadable after a while. The book is just too long to carry it off, the constant lists of people were just so boring that I had to give up. Her other books are great though!
Super-Gone with the Windsors September 11, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I enjoyed this book hugely. I have read quite a few historical works regarding this time period in history and Gone with the Windsors referenced a few of them, which made it even more amusing.
It is not a masterpiece, but if you would like to have good belly laugh at the awful Duchess of Windsors this is the book for you.
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