What a Nanny Knows
When Marion Crawford, the nanny for then-Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, published a gentle, ghostwritten memoir in the 1950s about her life with the royals, it was an instant sensation. The book, “novelistic and carefully plotted,” as my colleague Caitlin Flanagan noted in 2006, 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.