What We Know About King Edward VIII's "Lost" Memoir Featuring His Private Notes
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Early this year, Prince Harry's memoir, Spare, became a blockbuster when it revealed a peek behind the curtain of royal life. However, the Duke of Sussex was not the first royal to pen a tell-all—in fact, numerous royals have published memoirs over the years, including none other than the former King Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne and became the Duke of Windsor.
In 1951, the Duke of Windsor authored a memoir, A King's Story, about his decision to abdicate and marry Wallis Simpson, working with ghostwriter Charles Murphy. A few years later, he worked with Wallis on her memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons. Decades later, author Jane Marguerite Tippett discovered Murphy's notes in the Boston University Archive, including an early draft of the memoir, transcriptions from interviews with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and more.
Once a King: The Lost Memoir of Edward VIII
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"It was all new material," she told The Telegraph. "How, I kept asking myself, could it not have been found before? My heart was racing." She compiled the previously unseen material in a new book, Once a King: The Lost Memoir of Edward VIII, which is out now in the UK, and will be published in the U.S. on March 19, 2024.
Tippett writes, "It throws new light on how and why he chose to abdicate rather than live without the only woman he ever loved. It tells Edward's story as he saw it, lived it and remembered it. His failures, weaknesses, naivety and flaws are on full display but so, too, are his intelligence, his loyalty, his love and his resolve. It is, for the first time, Edward's story."
Per the publisher, Once a King "reproduces this uncrowned King's previously unseen writing, including much that he could or would not write for publication in 1951. Jane Marguerite Tippett weaves together Edward's writing alongside newly uncovered interviews with the Duke and Duchess, diary entries from ghostwriter Charles Murphy and other sources. Together this forms an extraordinary new portrait of one of the most famous characters in modern royal history and his recollections and innermost feelings, particularly around the abdication of 1936."
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