Private Di

She was a lady, a princess, the mother of the heir to the throne and the most celebrated divorcée in the world. She was a passionate promoter of worthy causes and, in the eyes of millions of people, if not billions, a martyr. Maybe it seems churlish, almost 10 years after her death, to say that this English rose, Diana, Princess of Wales, was also cruelly manipulative and a serial adulterer, but, yes, she was those things, too.

Lady Diana Spencer, who called herself a dumb blonde—"thick as a plank" was her phrase—became, as Princess Diana, one of the most variegated icons of modern times, and she's been a paradigm for celebrities-with-causes ever since. Diana could be victimizer as well as victim, harridan as well as humanitarian. She could be coldly dismissive of her closest friends, but she was full of tenderness for strangers, and ennobled by the way they embraced her. A little girl in Angola, dying from wounds inflicted by a land mine, thought Diana was an angel when she sat by her bed in early 1997. When Diana herself was killed in a car crash several months later, the world mourned her as if it had lost a saint. In fact, the beatified Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who died that same week, drew far less attention.

For Tina Brown, author of "The Diana Chronicles"—published this week—the life of the princess has long been a fascinating and profitable tale to tell. Brown was the dazzling young editor of the glossy, gossipy society magazine Tatler in London in the early 1980s, before she came to the United States to take over first, Vanity Fair and, until 1998, The New Yorker. Their lives and trajectories were oddly but clearly intertwined. Certainly the princess helped launch the editor's career. From the beginning, Brown and her twentysomething colleagues saw the even younger Diana as "a generational echo," says Brown. Di's fairy tale turned nightmare life became a lens for looking into the stultified world of the royals even as her celebrity friends and her public and private passions reflected the creative dynamism of modern Britain. She was, as Brown wrote for Vanity Fair in 1985, "the mouse that roared." And then, so much more. "My goal with the book was to create the context," says Brown: "Not just Diana, but the Diana years."

Already this is shaping up to be the Diana Summer, with a spectacular concert organized by her sons, Princes William and Harry, to mark her birthday on July 1 (she would have been 46), and memorial services commemorating the decade since her death in August. Just last week a documentary on Britain's Channel 4 showing photographs of the crash scene taken the night Diana died came under scathing criticism as tasteless exploitation insensitive to the feeling of her sons and of the sympathetic public. Other books are on the way, many of them delving into well-plumbed "secrets" about Diana's life.

But Brown's book is different—at once more intimate and more aloof—than much that has come before. Having interviewed some 250 people and read shelves of biographies, stacks of tabloids, reams of detailed inquest reports, she makes calls and considered judgments on topics ranging from royal infidelities and Diana's sexual awakening (which she attributes to Maj. James Hewitt, one of seven lovers she's known to have had), to the controversy surrounding Diana's death (an accident).

The author met the princess only "four or five times" face to face, including a long lunch at the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York City that summer of the crash. But Brown had followed Diana so closely as she changed from "a fairy child" to "this self-possessed kind of striding, global superstar" that, says Brown, "I had this bond with the story." Certainly she tells it well, and it's a fair guess that "The Diana Chronicles" will be about as common as tanned navels on British and American beaches. When one reads through the full 524 pages, including notes, it's clear that Brown, having bonded for so long with "the story," has also discovered, for herself and for us, the woman.