That Woman
Anne Sebba, Jane Ridley
Twenty five years after her death, Wallis Simpson exerts a more powerful fascination than ever. That Woman is the first full scale biography written by a woman about the Duchess of Windsor, one of the most glamorous and vilified women of the last century and a key character in the recent blockbuster film,The King’s Speech.
In order to understand the real person behind the iconic image, historian Anne Sebba explored the mind and motivations of this enigmatic American divorcee who nearly became Queen of England. Her new material revealed the Jewish roots of her second husband Ernest Simpson and provided a fresh interpretation of what really happened during the abdication crisis. Anne Sebba also gave us a fascinating insight into the painstaking job of the biographer as investigator.
Anne Sebba: award winning biographer, historian and author of eleven books. Her latest book is Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy published in the UK and US in 2021.
In 2016 Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940’s was the winner of the 2016 Franco-British Society book prize. Previously Anne wrote That Woman, a biography of Wallis Simpson and the scandal of the 1936 abdication crisis based on her discovery of a secret cache of letters.
A former Reuters Foreign Correspondent, Anne is a broadcaster and regularly appears on television talking about her books. She is a former chair of Britain's 10,000 strong Society of Authors and lecturer who gives talks to a variety of audiences in the US and UK as well as on cruises and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research.
Jane Ridley is a professor of history at the university of Buckingham and the author of The Young Disraeli described by Andrew Marr in the Independent as \'a rich, dense and thoughtful biography which may-become the definitive one\' . She is also the author of Edwin Lutyens and is Lutyens\'s great-granddaughter. Her life of Edward VII will be published by Chatto in August 2012.
