True Grace

True Grace is Wendy Leigh’s biography of Grace Kelly, published in 2007 by JR Books Limited, and its subtitle calls her “an American Princess.” Google Books dates the book September 1, 2007, and gives it 305 pages. The Open Library record files it under biography, motion picture actors and actresses, and princesses.

The two records describe its contents in similar terms. Open Library’s description says the portrait sets losses and painful obstacles against what it calls a “seemingly charmed life,” and it names affairs from both before and after the marriage, along with a premonition of dying in a car crash. The publisher’s description on Google Books opens on a “storybook American tale” of a self-made millionaire’s daughter who married a prince. It also names the premonition and the affairs, says the men involved were famous, and states that Leigh treats the life “with compassion and care.”

Of the 15 other books on Kelly in the catalog, 13 came out earlier, from Marjorie P. K. Weiser’s Grace Kelly (1970) to Jenny Curtis’s Grace Kelly (1998). Two have later dates, Donald Spoto’s High society: the life of Grace Kelly (2009) and Jennifer O’Callaghan’s Rear Window (2025).

For fans

The records and the editions

The records do not agree on a single edition of the book. The catalog gives 2007 and JR Books Limited, while the Open Library record shows a JR Books Limited edition dated 2008 and includes large type books among its subjects. The bibliography in Wikipedia’s article on Grace Kelly cites a different imprint, listing the book as a 2007 New York publication from Thomas Dunne Books. That same bibliography also lists Robert Lacey’s Grace, along with works by Spoto, J. Randy Taraborrelli and Thilo Wydra.

Both descriptions name the premonition. Wikipedia’s article on Kelly says a mild cerebral hemorrhage struck her at the wheel on September 13, 1982, on the road back to Monaco from Roc Agel, and it reports that she died the following night.

Beside the other books

Leigh’s book falls nine years after Curtis’s and two years before Spoto’s, by the catalog’s dates. Wikipedia’s bibliography dates Spoto’s title differently, giving 1994 and 2010. Type does little to separate these books, since the catalog labels all but one of the others as biography. The exception is James Spada’s Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess (1987, Dell), which it labels a memoir.

The titles offer narrower points of comparison. Elizabeth Gillen Surcouf’s Grace Kelly, American princess (1992, Lerner) uses the same two words as Leigh’s subtitle. Jane Ellen Wayne’s Grace Kelly’s men (1991) puts the men in its title, whereas Leigh’s affairs appear in the descriptions and not on the cover line.