ELIZABETH & MARGARET

The British celebrity biographer and dogged royal watcher examines the relationship between Queen Elizabeth II (b. 1926) and her only sister, Princess Margaret (1930-2002).

At the risk of stating the obvious, fans of the Netflix series The Crown will be keen to devour Morton’s latest portrait of the royal family, following his 2018 book, Meghan: A Hollywood Princess. (The author has also written unauthorized biographies of Madonna, Tom Cruise, and Angelina Jolie.) Here, Morton focuses on the close relationship of the queen and her only sibling, who was both her closest supporter and sometime rival. From their earliest years, the two were rare peas in a royal pod. With their father’s unexpected accession to the throne as George VI, following Edward VIII’s scandalous abdication in 1936, the daughters became second and third in line to the throne. As in previous books on the royal family, the author captures their dramatic differences in temperament and character. Elizabeth was dutiful, shy, retiring, imperturbable, and content to embrace tradition and protocol; Margaret was theatrical, extroverted, individualistic, and self-indulgent. Their differences grew more pronounced over the years, even perilously so. Elizabeth dug into her role as queen with a dour sense of fatality while Margaret flaunted the royal boundaries at every turn. Morton focuses much attention on Margaret’s unraveling, as she continually fought against her sister’s staid public image and conventional marriage by capturing tabloid headlines in pursuit of “unsuitable” men—from the divorced, older Group Capt. Peter Townsend to the much younger Roddy Llewelyn. The author points out the double standard used against Margaret at the time, when “older women dating younger men had not yet been accepted by the mainstream.” Morton cruises through the events of the decades to create a smooth, composite portrait of the messy yet indissoluble bond between sisters.

A fairly evenhanded portrait sure to please fans of the royal-family genre.