Alice

Alice by Hugo Vickers offers a fascinating exploration of an enigmatic royal figure. 'In 1953, at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Alice was dressed from head to foot in a long grey dress and a grey cloak, and a nun's veil. Amidst all the jewels, and velvet and coronets, and the fine uniforms, she exuded an unworldly simplicity. Seated with the royal family, she was a part of them, yet somehow distanced from them. Inasmuch as she is remembered at all today, it is as this shadowy figure in grey nun's clothes...'

Princess Alice, mother of Prince Phillip, was something of a mysterious figure even within her own family. She was born deaf, at Windsor Castle, in the presence of her grandmother, Queen Victoria, and was brought up in England, Darmstadt, and Malta.

In 1903, she married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, and from then on, her life was overshadowed by wars, revolutions, and enforced periods of exile. By the time she was thirty-five, virtually every point of stability was overthrown. Although the British royal family remained in the ascendant, her German family ceased to be ruling princes. Her two aunts who had married Russian royalty met savage ends, and soon afterwards, Alice's own husband was nearly executed as a political scapegoat.

The middle years of her life, which should have followed a conventional and fulfilling path, did the opposite. She suffered from a serious religious crisis and, at the age of forty-five, was removed from her family and placed in a sanatorium in Switzerland, where she was pronounced a paranoid schizophrenic. As her stay in the clinic became prolonged, there was a time when it seemed she might never walk free again. How she achieved her recovery is just one of the remarkable aspects of her story.