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Of course, this is partly a tabloid mourning, just as Diana herself had become a tabloid star--almost a fictional star. Since the days of Thomas Hardy at least, people have been moved to passionate sorrow by the death of public personalities they have never met, and who sometimes never existed. No doubt thousands wept over the fate of Tess of the d'Urbervilles when her story appeared week by week in the Graphic in 1890, just as truly as they wept for Diana when they read of her death in the Sun in 1997. They have been deluded into thinking they actually knew her by the tireless machines of the media, and they have cried for her as for one of their own children.
Then again it is doubtless partly mass hysteria--groupies genuinely mean it too, when they swoon in the presence of their idols, one scream leading to another, one pair of panties thrown onstage soon leading to a storm of votive lingerie. It is partly resentment against the in-laws. Despite late damage limitation from the palace, many Britons see the British royal family as villains in this soap opera, stuffy and reactionary guardians of an old order into which Diana came as a lovely catalyst, only to be spurned as young heroines so often are.
But perhaps, I like to think, the death of Diana has acted as a kind of catharsis for her nation. This has not been a happy half-century for the British. It has been a time of frustration and febrile self-doubt. Most of the national institutions, from the monarchy itself to the BBC, have lost their old sense of confident authority. In an age when no island is an island anymore, the very national identity, once apparently so unassailable, has been whittled away. British traditions have been discarded, British values have lost their meaning. A great people seems to be in moral limbo.
With the death of a lovely if maddening princess, out it has all poured. Something, as the old song said, had to give, and perhaps this fantastic display of public grief, so vulgar in many ways, so unconvincing in others, has to it some spiritual element after all. Perhaps in their hearts--or so I hope--the British people see Diana as a fellow victim of degraded times, and have instinctively seized upon her death as the moment for a fresh start.
Jan Morris is the author of several travel books and the forthcoming Fifty Years of Europe: An Album. She lives in Wales