History has been cruel to Wallis Simpson

If there is one thing that Paul French’s forthcoming book Her Lotus Year should put right about Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, it is that her so-called ‘lotus year’ in China in the 1920s was not the sexual bacchanal that it has been painted as by the prurient and the envious. Instead it was a formative – if exotic – experience that helped shape her into the woman she became. Yet rumours of Wallis’s outré behaviour have been common currency for the past century. Even French’s finely researched publication is unlikely to dispel our fascination with the so-called ‘China dossier’, an apocryphal account of all the wrongdoings that the Duchess got up to, years before she met the future Edward VIII.

It has become shorthand for the historically illiterate and lazy to compare Wallis to Meghan Markle on the grounds that both were American, married a member of the royal family, and apparently precipitated their spouses’ departure from British society as a result.