What a Nanny Knows
A nanny—fully immersed in the most intimate details of a family’s life, yet with an outsider’s point of view—can be the perfect protagonist: Your weekly guide to the best in books
When Marion Crawford, the nanny for then-Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, published a gentle, ghostwrittenmemoir in the 1950s about her life with the royals, it was an instant sensation. The book“novelistic and carefully plotted,” asmy colleague , cataloged all the kinds of details that might captivate an outsider: “of dress and of food and of housekeeping on the grandest level imaginable,” she wrote. After Crawford published the book without the royal family’s permission, they —who appeared to genuinely care for her charges—for the rest of her life.
