Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, left her family when Diana was six years old. She later became a devout Catholic and settled on a Scottish island. She and Diana were never fully reconciled. She outlived her daughter by seven years.
Frances Roche married John Spencer, Viscount Althorp, in 1954. They had four children: Sarah, Jane, a son who died shortly after birth, and Diana, born in 1961. The marriage deteriorated across the early 1960s and the couple separated in 1967. Frances left and did not take the children. Custody was awarded to John Spencer following a contentious hearing in which Frances’s own mother gave evidence against her.
Diana was six years old when her mother left. She and her siblings spent their childhood primarily at their father’s homes. Frances remarried — Peter Shand Kydd — in 1969. The relationship between Diana and her mother across the years that followed was, by the accounts of those close to both of them, loving but irregular, marked by the specific difficulty of a relationship that had been interrupted at a fundamental moment.
In later years, Frances converted to Catholicism and moved to the island of Seil off the Scottish coast, where she lived quietly and gave very few interviews. She and Diana were close in certain periods and more distant in others. When Diana cooperated with the Morton biography, Frances publicly criticised the project.
When Diana died, Frances was in Scotland. She flew to Paris. She walked at the funeral. She said, in a rare subsequent interview, that she blamed herself for aspects of her daughter’s life that she felt she could have been more present for.
She died in June 2004. Diana had been gone for seven years. The distance between them, which had never quite been closed, was permanent by then.
