In laying her life bare, she demonstrates the limitations of being a woman in the British class system, showing that privilege is no insulation from suffering or pain. The authors new books are opportunities to reflect on our own lives during a 70-year period. By unflinchingly examining everything from her troubled marriage and her fraught relationship with her children to the solace she found in service, the author emerges as a flawed yet steely woman worthy of respect. The poor-little-rich-girl story is hardly new, but what makes this account fresh and poignant is Glenconner’s use of affluent characters to demonstrate the extent to which class trumps power. Glenconner's candor about wealth and privilege enables readers to sympathize. A pleasing blend of detail and balance, the book provides sufficient glimpses into sumptuous palaces and shooting parties to inspire awe and keen insight into the people who inhabit them. This fascinating memoir introduces us to Anne Glenconner, the daughter of. Glenconner's meticulously detailed memoir of her life in service to the crown will whet the appetite of anyone hungering for more tales of Britain's royals. Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown by Anne Glenconner. Glenconner’s descriptions of these difficult times are evidence of the grit that underlies her genteel affect.

Despite its madcap romps, Lady in Waiting can make for sobering reading, and the downside of this privileged life, with its potential for tragedy, looms over three of Glenconner’s five children.

Glenconner’s travels on Margaret’s overseas tours yield some of the book’s best anecdotes.

The pleasures of Glenconner’s tales must be winkled out of her sturdy if occasionally clichéd prose: revelations of the strange juxtapositions of an unexpectedly upstairs-downstairs aristocratic life. It seems particularly apt that Anne Coke Tennant, Baroness Glenconner, was born into an ancient British family whose crest is an ostrich swallowing an iron horseshoe, symbolizing, as she puts it, 'our ability to digest anything.' Readers of her sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling, sometimes affecting, sometimes clueless memoir will learn that she was a perfect ostrich.

Lady glenconner book