“I’ve had Japanese people crying when I tell them I’m not Diana,” British woman Christina Hance, who sometimes earned thousands of pounds a day as a Diana impersonator, told the BBC in 1996. A few months later, she announced she was stepping back from her duties as a Diana lookalike, saying the job had sent her mad and made her ill. “I ended up a zombie just like her […] the strain of public life has been too much for both of us,” she said. Probably the best known of countless professional Diana impersonators, she “didn’t really look very much like Diana at all”, according to Edward White, whose new book Dianaworld: An Obsession is at least as much about “the princess’s people” as the “People’s Princess”. In other words, it’s about “the sprawling, ever-evolving precinct of her various lives – public and private, real and imagined” – while mapping how Diana-the-icon has been created by her various “publics”. Review: Dianaworld: An Obssession – Edward White (Allen Lane)These “publics” sprang from diverse communities: from couturiers to courtiers, hairdressers to politicians, royal servants to sex workers, astrologers to gays, newspapermen to fickle paternal advisors – and soothsayers, superfans and satirists. And, of course, lookalikes.Dianaworld describes a Diana who was many things to many people. “Dig deep enough”, White suggests, and you’ll find a part of Diana that was Jewish, or American, or a republican – or anything else that she wasn’t but you are.“ First and foremost, though, she was the "pale English rose celebrated for strengthening the Windsor monarchy with the DNA of her indigenous British ancestors”. She was “unencumbered by class identity, snobbery, or elitism of any kind precisely because she was so thoroughly, truly, aristocratic”. Tony Blair once told an interviewer Diana invented a “new way to be British”. White proposes: “It might be more accurate to say that through Diana, the British invented a new way of fantasizing about themselves.” And:Never was the domestic adulation of Diana so complete as when she was on the other side of the world. Organs of the British media documented her popularity abroad with an embarrassing neediness.White charts how the cult of Diana assumed global proportions.The United States liked to claim Diana as “an American princess” – for “only in America did Diana fully become Diana”, writes White. He argues she personified “the American Dream”, springing as she did from the life of a relative mortal (if one whose “family had been a mighty social presence for half a millennium”) to the superstardom of global celebrity. Diana often expressed a desire to relocate to the US, thousands of miles away from the strictures of the House of Windsor and arc-lamp intensity of the British tabloid press.Sound familiar? It seems Prince Harry’s destiny was written for him by his mother.When visiting Pakistan, India and various African and Middle Eastern countries, Diana was seen as a “post-imperial princess whose image transcended all kinds of social barriers, real and imagined”.White documents a group of Pakistani women who thrilled to the idea of Diana’s potential marriage to British-Pakistani cardiac surgeon Hasnat Khan, because it showed Diana “was doing what every Asian daughter was meant to do: marrying an Asian doctor”.Ahead of the Charles and Diana 1986 tour of Japan, thousands of Japanese schoolchildren were gifted Diana robot dolls. Numerous Diana lookalikes and impersonators donned Diana wigs and made appearances at supermarkets.Across several chapters, White returns to the idea of Diana’s “relationship with Britishness, especially the English component of that identity”. Back in Britain, Diana enjoyed a large following among the nation’s ethnic minority, as well as with the gay community. Her association with the latter was forged by her early embrace of the cause of HIV/AIDS. White writes: “the memory of her has become entwined with a particular idea of gay experience, in which defiance and radical honesty are king and queen.Acknowledging how Diana was "a woman of mythological complexity and far-reaching significance”, White dissects how so much of the mythologising tends to heap “cliché and trope upon her mythological pyre”.As the “fairytale princess at the centre of an archetypal romantic fantasy”, Diana was “loaded with other people’s ideas about love for close to half a century”. Dianaworld charts how this “love” spilled over to obsession, in alarming ways.Sexual obsessionDianaworld touches on the public’s sexual obsession with the princess, filtered through the male gaze of the media and the royal establishment.One of the most interesting groups of Diana supporters White identifies are the older, well-connected paternalistic admirers who assumed the mantle of “fatherly advisor”. The likes of Clive James, film producer David Puttnam, and actor and director Richard Attenborough offered her advice on how to perform her royal role and navigate her life post-separation.One, former British MP Woodrow Wyatt, wrote approvingly in his diary of Diana’s innocent feminine allure, but changed his view after revelations of her extra marital affairs were made in Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story, casting her in a madonna-whore paradigm.No longer required to revere Diana as the English rose, Wyatt – and many others like him – was now free to despise her and desire her, the nasty twin impulses that had always hovered in the backdrop of the soft-focus princess worship of earlier, more innocent, less honest times.Lavish and inconstant, tyrannical and needyDianaland charts how the cult of “Diana love/obsession” had its parallel in the way Diana conducted her own private relationships. It seems that she loved others in private in the way that her public loved her – lavishly and inconstantly, stiflingly and adoringly, tyrannically and needily, all or nothing.With Prince Charles, she passed as an outdoors-loving fan of stalking deer, shooting grouse, fly-fishing and long country hikes. With James Hewitt, she took up riding lessons and clothed her young sons in junior-sized military uniforms. With rugby union player Will Carling, she became a football fan (Carling has denied they had an affair). And with cardiac surgeon Hasnat Kahn, she donned a surgical robe and mask and was filmed watching him perform heart surgery.When the police interviewed Diana after hundreds of silent phone calls made to art dealer Oliver Hoare’s home were traced to Kensington Palace, another image of Diana emerged: both stalked and stalker. InfluencesDianaworld is a compendium of existing scholarship about the princess, taking its lead from Michael Billig’s groundbreaking sociological study from the early 1980s, Talking of the Royal Family, and Jude Davies’ 2001 Diana, A Cultural History: Gender, Race, Nation and the People’s PrincessIt draws heavily, too, on the biographies of Diana by Sally Bedell Smith (1999), Sarah Bradford (2006) and Tina Brown (2007).Nonetheless, it distinguishes itself by choosing to take an often amusing, lighthearted approach, more in line with Diana Simmonds’ Squidgie Dearest (1995) and Craig Brown’s Princess Margaret biography, Ma’am Darling (2017).In this way, it recognises how the worlds of the princess’ people are often absurd and nonsensical, fantastical and comical.So many DianasWhite describes, for example, one British cinema preview audience’s laughter at the inadvertently hilarious dialogue of one of the early Diana and Charles biopics. Diana: “I just need you to hold me and touch me”; Charles: “Yes, but you’re always being sick.” He employs some wry wit to recount how Diana was given an award for Humanitarian of the Year “at a glitzy ceremony in New York at the end of 1995, among a who’s who of selfless lovers of humanity, including Henry Kissinger and Donald Trump”.One chapter, Dianarama, about the memorialisation of Diana in public art, tells the story of the sculptor John Houlston who, at the end of 1997, had begun a “nine-foot, two-ton work of metal and resin” of Diana, to be placed outside the London headquarters of the National AIDS Trust. Houlston said that he had been trying to “imbue his rendering of Diana with some of the qualities of Leonardo’s Virgin Mary”, but “the fly in the ointment was that a family of thrushes had taken up residency in Diana’s left ear”.Houlston had to temporarily abandon the project. The sculpture was never completed.White weaves some interesting threads between stories of the ways Diana’s various “publics” expressed their devotion to the princess. She gave them, he writes, “an avatar through whom to lead a second life, one that was otherworldly, yet contained something of themselves within it”.With considerable perspicacity, White concludes, With her clones and impersonators crowding the streets from Kensington to Kyoto, at times over the last half century it has been difficult to tell where Diana stops and the rest of us begin.So many Dianas – and Dianaland will by no means be the last on the subject.Giselle Bastin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.