I dont know if her life was that differnet as a young girl to other upper class children, esp if there had been a divorce in the family, which was common enough by then. TIna Brown states that she felt the RF didn't understand that so many upper class families didn't live in the same formal way that had been common for them earlier, big fancy house parties, servants rigidly behind the Green baize door, dressing up and eating formally etc. Di's immediate family hadn't been "couriters" for a while, because her father's divorce had made him more reclusive and he was content to stay at home and not to force a formal lifestyle on the children... and they had all been to boarding school... and then lived in flats and looked after themselves..I tuldn't have known how far from the norm (for her strata of society) her life was, Charles likely had no idea at all of how she'd lived...
And it seems they all just sort of assumed that because they socialized in a similar way at certain functions then their home lives and general expectations would be compatible enough.
So I think she was out of touch with the almost Edwardian way the RF lived, and some upper class families who were closest to them.
I think that many other upper class girls who might have married Charles mgiht have been a bit taken aback by how rigid and old fashioned was the RF lifestyle, but I htink that Diana was not very adaptable. She was already bulimic and stressed out and unsure if her marriage was the right thing, and the formal lifestyle really took her by surprise and she coudln't/didn't want to adapt to it. (So a lot of stories have emerged about her unhappiness with "family social life" in the first years of her marriage. among them one that the queen said soemthing on the lines of "I dont care if its hard for her, she has to just buck up and learn to fit in...") Perhaps another similarly aged upper class bride mihgt have also found the formality a surprise and hard to cope with but might not have shown their unhappiness so openly and would have tried harder to adapt.
Nowadays, Kate and WIlliam are allowed to be more flexible about joining the RF for Christmas etc, they have lived together in Wales in a more simple way than was possible at the time for Charles and Diana, and Camilla keeps a separate house so that she can be more informal and relaxed iwth her children and grandchildren...
Last edited: