delves into origin of royal family in book

Sitting in the library of her Washington, D.C., home, on a sunny morning in February, Sally Bedell Smith ’70 took a break from writing a piece for The Wall Street Journal to talk via Zoom about her latest book, George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy.

She had just returned from the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival in Palm Springs, Calif., where she was a guest panelist for the event “The Art of Biography.” Soon she would be traveling again to 22 locations for more than 30 lectures, including one on March 22 in Palm Beach, Fla., which was arranged by her good friend Susan Schiffer Stautberg ’67, and one at the Nantucket Book Festival in June.

Smith is in high demand for speaking engagements and media commentary as the fascination with the royal family dramatically increases in light of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the upcoming coronation of King Charles III and, of course, the ever-present media attention on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. In fact, Smith is scheduled to be a royal commentator in England for CNN during the coronation ceremony on May 6.

The author and historian has written three New York Times bestsellers about the royal family—Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life (Random House, 2017); Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (Random House, 2012); and Diana in Search of Herself: Portrait of a Troubled Princess (Signet, 1999).

For her new book, “I thought, well, why don’t I find out what’s at the root of all of this?” Smith said. So, she wrote about the origins of the family.

George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy (Random House,

2023), is a 565-page endeavor (with an additional 94 pages of endnotes) that took four years to research and write. It chronicles the story of King George VI and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the parents of Queen Elizabeth II, and how they raised their family while meeting the challenges of World War II.

“The appeal of this book to me is that it is fundamentally a wonderful love story that I am able to tell for the first time based on their diaries and letters from the early 1920s,” said Smith, who was given special access to original materials in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle by Queen Elizabeth II.

Smith, who majored in history at Wheaton and was a 2020 honorary degree recipient, is accustomed to extensively interviewing many people for her books. But for this one she had to rely heavily on the archives in addition to original sources, unpublished materials and research that took her into the stacks at The London Library as well as collections in Britain and Canada.

“Those long nights that I would spend in the basement of Everett Hall [at Wheaton], with my little file cards, doing my history papers for [the late Wheaton history professor] Paul Helmreich I think really helped,” she said. “Obviously, the whole way of doing things now is very different but it did sort of imprint me with the curiosity and the way of organizing things that would enable me to write something