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While still married, she became involved with cavalry officer James Hewitt in a five-year affair that ended in the most humiliating way possible for any woman: Hewitt sold their story in a trashy account, Princess in Love, which was said to have left her heartbroken. Following Hewitt was an equally disastrous relationship with James Gilbey, which ended in scandal when a tabloid publication printed a tape of a private phone call between them. Then came a rugby captain, Will Carling, and then a prominent businessman, Christopher Whalley. Next, Diana was said by the tabloids to have fallen in love with a Pakistani-born heart surgeon, Hasnat Khan, whom she reportedly hoped to marry; except the intensity of public scrutiny may have been too much for Dr. Khan.
And last was Dodi, an even more exotic figure than his predecessors, an international playboy, who was clearly attracted to Diana as the most celebrated glamour-icon of our time. Yet Diana seems to have had a great hope for this latest love, reportedly confiding in a friend the day before her death, "For the first time in my life I can say I am really happy...I again feel loved." These words strike the ear as naively trusting, almost childlike. For a woman fated to die an imminent, hideous death, they have the ring of unbearable pathos.
Yet it isn't Diana as the hunted, Diana as victim, that accounts for her phenomenal worldwide appeal. She is mourned by both men and women, but it's her significance for women that approaches the mystical. In Diana, the fairy-tale princess who was cruelly awakened to the world of hurt, betrayal and humiliation, women of all ages found a mirror image of themselves, however magnified and glamourized. In her ordeals, in the courage, stubbornness and idealism of her attempt to reinvent herself as an independent woman, women have found a model for themselves. It was this Diana, stronger for her own suffering, heroic for all that she was vulnerable, with whom women will continue to identify.
Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of works of fiction. Her latest, Man Crazy, is being published this month