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On the other hand, evidence could be found in considerable quantities about Lies, all lies: auto/biography as fiction 26 reassurance by academic work and sexual encounters. Of both of these forms of emotional order, the autobiography gives ample instances. Nevertheless, what de Beauvoir gives us in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is a rational, and rationalising, account of her scholastic commitment. For her, the energy she devoted to her studies has nothing to do for a search for inner coherence but everything to do with a desire for coherence in the world, and for control in it.

In reading both Frances Donaldson and Philip Ziegler on Edward VIII, it is apparent that a very large number of people were involved in ensuring that the monarchy continued, and moreover continued in the way which they thought suitable. The meaning of this suitability was fixed in terms that were completely literal and were subsequently to prove disastrous for a later generation. But the literal meaning decided for the monarchy in the 1930s was that the monarch should embody the expectations of bourgeois family life within the context of aristocratic privilege.

In this it is important to emphasise the limits of the agency of the Royal Family; one interpretation of the Saga of Windsor is that of a family freely choosing and directing its fate, but to ascribe this degree of active direction to the family is misleading. From the time of Queen Victoria onwards, it is apparent that the monarch had a portion of great privilege (in the material sense) but was also deeply circumscribed by a hierarchical court system. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert established an ethos of anti-luxury at court, and Queen Victoria (very much like King George V and King George VI) was fond of proclaiming to the world her enthusiasm for the simple life.