Grace of Monaco

Grace of Monaco, by Steven Englund, is a 392-page biography of Grace Kelly, published by Doubleday in 1984. Google Books gives the full title as Grace of Monaco: An Interpretive Biography. The Open Library record files it under biography, motion picture actors and actresses, princesses and princes. Its description calls the book a “rare and insightful look” at the whole of her life, placed among the people, places, ideas and traditions around her.

The publisher description carried by Google Books uses the words “serious appraisal” and names four subjects: her youth, her film career, her marriage and her life in Monaco. That description sets those subjects against the institutions, traditions and ideas that formed her life and beliefs. Both records point to a reader who wants the whole life and its setting, rather than the screen career alone.

In the catalog’s list of books about Kelly, three biographies are older: Marjorie P. K. Weiser’s Grace Kelly (1970), Gwen Robyns’s Princess Grace (1976) and Phyllida Hart-Davis’s Grace, the story of a princess (1982). Sarah Bradford’s Princess Grace, issued by Panther, carries the same year as Englund’s, 1984.

For fans

The later books

The titles that follow Englund’s in the catalog’s list include James Spada’s Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess (1987), Jeffrey Robinson’s Rainier & Grace (1989), Robert Lacey’s Grace (1994), Wendy Leigh’s True Grace (2007) and Donald Spoto’s High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly (2009). The catalog classes Englund’s book as a biography, as it does those of Robinson, Lacey, Leigh and Spoto, and it classes Spada’s as a memoir. Of the titles in that list, only Englund’s carries the word “interpretive,” and the word comes from the Google Books record. Wikipedia’s entry on Grace Kelly lists Lacey, Leigh and Spoto in its bibliography and does not list Englund.

The film with the same title

The title also belongs to a 2014 film directed by Olivier Dahan, with Nicole Kidman as Kelly. Wikipedia’s entry calls the reaction to that film largely negative and reports that many people, the princely family of Monaco among them, faulted its drama, its history and its depth. Neither the Open Library record nor the Google Books record mentions the film. Neither record quotes a review of the book or says how it was received in 1984.