Princess Grace

Princess Grace is a book about Grace Kelly by Gwen Robyns, published by W.H. Allen in 1976, and the Open Library catalog facts class it as a biography. Among the 15 other books about Kelly on the catalog list, only Marjorie P. K. Weiser’s Grace Kelly (1970) carries an earlier date. Those two are the only titles dated before 1982, the year Wikipedia’s entry gives for Kelly’s death.

It is for a reader who wants a book on Kelly from before that date, rather than one of the later biographies such as Robert Lacey’s Grace (1994) or Donald Spoto’s High Society (2009). It should not be confused with Sarah Bradford’s Princess Grace, a 1984 biography with the same title, listed with Panther as its publisher.

For fans

The editions on record

The records disagree on length, and they describe editions with different dates. The Google Books record dates its edition to 1976 and names W H Allen as the publisher. It counts 328 pages. The Open Library record lists an edition published in 1982, and it also names W H Allen as the publisher. That record counts 288 pages, which is 40 fewer than the Google Books figure. Neither record explains the difference, and the Open Library record does not say whether the 1982 edition was revised.

The other books on the list

On the catalog list, which runs oldest first, the title after Robyns’s is Phyllida Hart-Davis’s Grace, the story of a princess (1982, Collins). Steven Englund’s Grace of Monaco (Doubleday) and the Bradford book follow in 1984. The list classes all of these as biographies, and it gives the same label to every other title except James Spada’s Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess (1987, Dell), which it calls a memoir. Later entries include Jeffrey Robinson’s Rainier & Grace (1989, Atlantic Monthly Press), Judy Quine’s The bridesmaids (1989, Weidenfeld & Nicolson) and Jane Ellen Wayne’s Grace Kelly’s men (1991, Random House Value Publishing). The newest entry is Jennifer O’Callaghan’s Rear Window (2025, Citadel), dated 49 years after Robyns’s book. The sources differ on one label: the list calls Howell Conant’s Grace (1992, Random House) a biography, while Wikipedia’s entry on Kelly describes it as a book of photographs.

Robyns and Kelly

Robyns’s name appears again among Kelly’s own books. Wikipedia’s entry on Kelly says that in 1980 she published My Book of Flowers with Gwen Robyns, a work on floral aesthetics, symbolism and flower pressing. That date falls four years after the 1976 biography. Neither the Open Library record nor the Google Books record gives a description or a review of Princess Grace, and little is recorded about what the book contains.