Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

First, thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC of this work of nonfiction, a history of sorts of Wallis Simpson, the late Duchess of Windsor, and the time she spent in China in the mid-1920s. I have long been drawn to nonfiction works about the Royal Family of Great Britain and have a shelf-full of biographies of many of the central characters of the BRF. As I have read quite a bit about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, I thought this would be a good addition to my working knowledge of their lives, both separate and together.

There were quite a few interesting tidbits in this book, both about the history of Hong Kong and China, but also some insight into the woman who started out as Bessie Wallis Warfield of Baltimore, Maryland, and through two divorces and a dangerous love affair became the woman who nearly brought down the monarchy in Great Britain.

This book reads like a history book, though, not a biography. There is a great deal of the financial and political upheavals of Hong Kong and China during this period of time. For the time period that Wallis lived there, either trying to repair her first marriage to Earl Winfield Spencer, Jr., who by most accounts was an alcoholic who became abusive when drunk, or trying to remake herself into someone who could move through the upper echelons of society, living as though she were a woman of means when she was clearly not.

Many times in the book, pages and pages go by with no mention of Wallis at all, which for me were the places where my interest waned. In the places where Wallis is mentioned, it is phrased as “Wallis would have” or “Wallis may have.” I am sure digging up the day to day movements of this want-to-be international socialite of 1924 and 1925 were no doubt difficult. So much about China has changed from that often turbulent times; the author even admits in his acknowledgements that paper trails are difficult from that period.

Also, in the sections of the book that feature Wallis and her tight circle of friends, both British and American also living in China, it is clear that this is a book Paul French wrote primarily to repair the reputation of the Duchess of Windsor from that period of her life. The tabloid rumors and whispers of scandals sometimes known as the “China Dossier” compiled at the request of the Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1935 persist to this day. The dossier which has never surfaced supposedly details the less savory things Wallis acquired while living in China, specifically of a sexual nature. Paul French states emphatically that the dossier was merely a public relations ploy to try to stop the then King of Great Britain from marrying a twice-divorced American with a questionable history, and more alarming, associations within the Nazi regime as the aspect of WWII loomed ahead.

All in all, I enjoyed parts of this book, especially where Paul French documents the origin of Wallis’s fascination for jade, pearls, Chinese furnishings, and more. I had not read of her using bridge and poker to not just pass the time in steamy Chinese summers but also to supplement her monthly stipend from her first husband. I wish the author was able to research and document more of Wallis’s personal life during this time to balance out the heavy historical influence of the work.