Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece (2000) Hardback (UK) 2000 Hardback (US) 2002 Paperback (UK) 2001 Paperback (US) 2003 Greek edition 2007 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. As one who witnessed her process alone up the long aisle of the abbey put it, 'She looked as though she were walking into eternity.' Seated with the royal family she was a part of them, yet somehow distanced from them. Inasmuch as she is remembered in all today; it is as this shadowy figure in grey nun's clothes. Princess Alice, mother of Prince Philip, was something of a mystery figure even within her own family. She was born deaf, at Windsor Castle, in the presence of her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, and 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. Though the British royal family remained in the ascendant, her German family ceased to be ruling princes, her two aunts who had married Russian royalty came to 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 'schizophrenic paranoid'. AS her stay in the clinic became prolonged, there was a time when it seemed that she might never walk free again. How she achieved her recovery is just one of the remarkable aspects of her story. Both UK and US paperback editions are in print. Copies of the American hardback edition (and a few of the English hardback) are available via this site, and can be signed by the author. Apply: booksales@wyeford.co.uk