Princess Diana often commented on feeling isolated within the Royal Family, so it's no wonder she turned to her circle of friends for support. In her recent Substack post titled "Princess Diana and Her Mother Confessor," veteran royal journalist and biographer Sally Bedell Smith shared how the late princess had a group of "surrogate mothers" as friends, including Elsa Bowker, a woman in her eighties who bonded with Diana. Bowker was the wife of diplomat Sir Reginald James Bowker and became a close confidant to the princess, bearing witness to the details of Diana's affair with married art dealer Oliver Hoare.
Citing her 1999 book Diana in Search of Herself, Bedell Smith wrote, "Diana’s mother figures were anywhere from twenty to fifty years her senior" and "included Lady Annabel Goldsmith, Lucia Flecha de Lima, Hayat Palumbo, and Elsa Bowker—formidable women in their own right, but all living outside the conventional world in which Diana had been raised." Bowker was particularly close to the royal, as Bedell Smith noted.
